This week’s readings—most directly Du Gay and Pryke’s work—reflect on the question: Are culture and economy synonymous? I left these reading with the impression that, no, these words are not synonymous, but they are intricately related. This impression led me to the question: What is the role/place of literacy in culture, economy, cultural economies, and economies of culture? It is this question—informed by the Zelizer “Introduction,” Zelizer “Intimacy,” and Ackerman readings—that I would like to dive deeper into.
In her “Introduction” Zelizer provides a narrative about how her scholarly work unexpectedly became interdisciplinary. As a graduate student, I always appreciate such narratives which aid me in my own navigation of academia. In regards to the question posed above, Zelizer’s “Introduction” discusses a topic I would like to discuss in connection to literacy: informal economies. Zelizer states economic sociologists have “moved away from the simple exportation of economic models” to study “the distinctive economic forms that arise in such settings as households, informal economies, consumption markets, the care economy, microcredits, migrant remittances, and gift transactions” (6). In reading this, I thought about literacy scholars’ various approaches to studying literacy in both formal and informal settings and on both macro and micro scales. I wonder how the economics lens of examining informal literacy economies could reshape literacy studies methodologies. Likewise, Zelizer’s “Intimacy in Economic Organizations” provided a new potential lens through which to shape and view literacy research and methodologies. This lens would suggest an examination of the ways in which intimacies shape not only economic and cultural relations but also literacy learning and literacy experiences. Ackerman, in discussing how civic engagement attempts to alter and overcome economic problems, prompted me to consider how literacy civic engagement more broadly alters literacy economies and economies of literacy.
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