CALL FOR PROPOSALS:

Expanding Literacy Studies is an International, Interdisciplinary Conference for Graduate Students to be held April 3-5, 2009, at The Ohio State University.

Literacy Studies is a recent construct. At the same time, it addresses long-standing questions and concerns within and across disciplines.
But what is literacy? Who is studying it? And how is it being studied?

Literacy is traditionally defined as reading and writing. Contemporary constructs, however, include everything from cyber and health literacy to mathematical and visual literacy. The potential advance this broadened view might represent is complicated by historical myths about literacy, persistent fears about declines in literacy, and failure to connect literacy research across disciplines.

Addressing the need for an expanded conversation about literacy that exceeds disciplinary boundaries, this conference is a space for graduate and professional students from all fields to ask questions, consider directions, examine representations, make connections, and share investigations of literacy, broadly defined. This conference aims to expand the dialogue and explore the landscape and intersections of literacy studies as a framework of critical investigation. This approach is meant to do the double work of expanding the field while critiquing the expansion. To that end, we invite proposals from graduate and professional students in ALL fields.

POSSIBLE TOPICS AND POINTS OF ENTRY:

* health literacy
* literacy and technology
* visual literacy
* representations of literacy
* definitions of literacy
* law and literacy
* art literacy
* uses and abuses of literacy
* motivations for literacy
* symbol systems
* the sociology of literacy
* the teaching of literacy
* reading and writing
* literacy and science
* performances of literacy
* literacy and popular culture
* the future of literacy
* histories of literacy
* intersections of literacy
* production and consumption of texts
* multiple literacies
* the literacy myth
* literacy and social change
* sites of literacy
* literacy in communities
* work literacy

WAYS TO PARTICIPATE:

* Facilitate a Roundtable Conversation
* Lead an Interactive Workshop
* Present a Creative Performance or Work of Art
* Participate on a Panel (present a paper or discuss a poster)
* Serve as a Discussant on a Panel of Presentations
* Share and Discuss Your Research in a Dissertation Workshop

WAYS TO COLLABORATE:

To facilitate cross-discipline and cross-institutional collaboration on proposals, we will begin posting requests for collaborators on the conference website immediately. Visit the site to connect with people who have submitted requests and/or submit your own request for collaborators. Please include a description of the topic and format (presentation, performance, workshop, etc.) you are interested in collaborating on, along with your contact information.

CONFERENCE SPECIAL FEATURES:

Keynote Panel with Harvey J. Graff: "Responses to The Literacy Myth:
30 Years Later"
In honor of the 30th Anniversary of the publication of The Literacy
Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth Century, author Harvey J. Graff will respond to a panel of graduate students from various disciplines speaking about "the literacy myth." Harvey J.
Graff is currently Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies and Professor of English and History at The Ohio State University.

Interactive Workshop by Participatory Design pioneer Liz Sanders Senior Lecturer in the Department of Design at Ohio State and President of MakeTools (a design research firm), Liz Sanders is a pioneer in the use of participatory research methods for the design of products, systems, services, and spaces. Sanders speaks about and teaches human-centered design to students, clients, and colleagues around the world. She will lead conference participants in an interactive workshop about the future of literacy, as a reflection of and closure for the conference.

Plenary Presentation by Shirley Brice Heath, author of Ways with Words Heath is a sociolinguist and anthropologist whose primary interests are oral and written language, youth development, racial relations, organizational learning, and the relationships among aesthetics, cognition, and human development. At the heart of Heath's research are the organizational structures and cultural values and behaviors that surround the learning and use of language. She is the author of the prize-winning book Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (1983) and co-editor of Identity and Inner-city Youth: Beyond Ethnicity and Gender (1993), as well as several other books and over 100 articles and book chapters. Heath is Professor at Large for the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and Margery Bailey Professor Emerita at Stanford University.

DEADLINE:

We will begin reviewing conference proposals September 1, 2008.
Proposals will not be accepted after October 15, 2008.

To learn more about the conference and to submit proposals, please go to http://literacystudies.osu.edu/conference.

This conference is sponsored by LiteracyStudies@TheOhioStateUniversity
(http://literacystudies.osu.edu).