Shifting Global Literacy Networks: How Emigration Promotes Informal Literacy Learning in Latvia

Abstract

A study of migrants' homeland family members in Latvia, a country undergoing drastic political change, this article examines migration-driven literacy-learning in shifting transnational contexts. Building from critiques of place-based literacy ethnographies, it documents three kinds of informal literacy learning-print literacy learning, digital literacy learning, and anticipatory literacy learning-resulting from the movement of people across shifting spatial and temporal fields.

Threshold Concepts and the Phenomenal Forms

“…In this context, the thingness of literacy is exemplified in how it is transferred across borders between migrants and their family members in their homeland. Email exchanges, video calls, and the gift of devices that aid communication serve not only as markers of love but also as avenues for family members to acquire new forms of literacies-such as digital literacy and composition skills (Vieira 2018). Understanding the inherent power of literacy to travel across time and space is essential for two reasons.…”

Trajectories of belonging and enduring technology: 2G phones and Syrian refugees in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

“…But the field of literacy studies (Street, 1984), sometimes invoked in digital migration studies, is well suited to this work (Borkert et al, 2018: 4). Vieira’s (2018) literacy study of Latvian migrants, for example, encompasses literacy objects ranging from letters to laptops and attends to their importance within migratory ‘literacy networks’. She describes the ‘ digital literacy practices ’ used to ‘sustain transnational family relationships across shifting borders’ (p. 166, original emphasis).…”

Lost and Found: Conflict in Transnationals’ Writing Identity

“…The idea of 'self' is central to writing (Ivanič, 1998). However, the social pressures that can surround the writing 'self' are multiple and more complex in their interrelationship for the transnational writer (Vieira, 2016;2018). The shaped 'self' employs language as a tool for making one's presence felt.…”