Jennifer Rowsell from Brock University  and I recently led this SSHRC funded symposium in Toronto, November 7th-9th 2012. Working with participants from Canada, the UK, the US and Australia we explored the theoretical and practical challenges involved in revisiting broadly defined literacy research subjects and /or sites from the past.

Our starting point was that it would be interesting and generative to revisit research subjects who we worked with over the last 10/20 years. We invited about a dozen well-known and early career scholars  in broadly speaking case study accounts of literacy (loosely defined in New Literacy Studies frame)  to participate in the seminar. We suggested that participants needed to be able to locate and meet up with the ‘actors’ who peopled their account(s), or a least one of them and review with them:

–       either the longer term nature of current literacy practices seeking to contextualise your contemporary accounts

–       and/or their current reflections on the kinds of intervention or project you worked with them in the past

–       and/or how lifecourse experiences may have shifted some of their earlier literacy practice orientations – the travel and traversal[1] of their literacy practices

–       and/or how the current digital regime have may have offered new and different opportunities for those earlier literacy practices

–       -and/or how revisiting these research subjects may reveal underlying trends about current literacy practices in general.

We will be publishing and disseminating our work in the near future.