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. 

I have been using some of my newly acquired COVID-19-related-at-home-work time to catch up on reading many books my father-in-law—an entrepreneur, accountant, and consultant—has recommended over the years. These books fit the “guru-style” self-help books described by Gregg (“Executive” 53). Somewhat serendipitously, as I began these readings, I also began reading my father-in-law’s recommended Timothy Ferris’s The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, a text which works to eliminate “presence bleed” by focusing on extreme efficiency in productivity achieved through automation (Gregg, “Introduction: Work’s” 19). Like the texts analyzed and discussed by Gregg, Ferris’s book focuses on veiwing time as a commodity. While Gregg critiques factors that have contributed to a work-centric worldview, Ferris feeds into the work-centric worldview by offering “life-hacking” skills to outsource work to lower paid individuals and machines globally. In Ferris’s attempts to eliminate the problem of productivity in his own life, he has simply forced his problem onto others, rather than directly addressing the systematic problem of productivity. Reading the three texts by Gregg in accompaniment with the Ferris book left me asking: What does it mean that literacy activities occur in work environments where such activities must become formulaically productive? And what is the position of literacy when it becomes an outsourced, low-paid activity? As an educator who teaches writing as process-oriented rather than product-oriented and who offers flexible deadlines, I was left questioning how my relationships with my students fit into a world focus on knowledge work as a needfully time-filling, product-oriented, resource-saving activity. Gregg says “the priority for employees [is] ‘never to be short of a project, bereft of an idea, always to have something in mind, in the pipeline’” (“Introduction: Work’s” 13). I wonder to what extent this mentality carries over from corporate sectors into academic work and how does this alter the quality of work actually accomplished.

I think I am not the target rhetorical audience of either Horner and Lu’s work or the work of Mike Rose. The intelligence and literacy skills involved in working class lives/blue collar jobs is nothing new to me, as like Rose, a large majority of my family members work in these types of careers as: machinists, foundry operators, factory works, truck drivers, food service employees, warehouse workers, hairdressers, electricians, construction workers, carpenters, and technicians. The fact that the intelligence of laborers needs to be addressed as an area for academic study is something I find frustrating and upsetting, but in no way surprising. The frustration I felt in tackling this week’s readings, namely the reading by Horner and Lu, was akin to the frustration I felt as a freshman in high school reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and as a master’s student reading Bill Bye’s Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem. In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich goes undercover to prove that minimum wage is not a livable wage, and as a 14-year-old I remember thinking something so obvious should not have to be researched in this manner of journalistic/academic exploration and should not have been presented as though this was an original revelation. I supposed I am frustrated by the need to counter such uninformed assumptions and stereotypes in the first place. In Everything All at Once, Nye expressed surprise upon his “discovery” that many individuals in Appalachian coal country feel oppressed by and resistant to “King Coal,” large mining corporations, strip mining, mountain top removal, and pollution. I was raised in a family and community in which academics were perceived as an enemy elite that looked down upon and misunderstood the people and places that I loved. Reading these by Rose, who has a similar positionality to myself, and by Lu and Horner, who do not, both reminded me—though in different ways—why this sentiment is so pervasive in my home community.

In reading Evan Watkins’s Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital, the concept that most grabbed my attention was attention. In Chapter 3 “Star Power,” Watkins’s discusses the “attention market” describing an economic understanding of attention as “a primary and still underexploited resource” that can be capitalized on to secure profit (94). In many discussions of marketing and branding, which I have had in my previous journalism education and public relations jobs, I participated in discussion about raising consumer interactions (clicks, reviews, comments) and increasing brand recognition. In positions where I was reaching for attention I had not consider attention as a resource purchased and sold as a product/good/service for a profit. Though I would have been quick to see attention as needed to secure sales, I had not considered attention as a commodifiable raw material involved in the production of marketing. I had not thought of television, video games, and offer media as attention purchasing devices. While I would have been quick to think of time as a commodity—a concept familiarized in such terms as wage theft—and of time as finite, I had not thought of attention as likewise commodified and finite. This understanding of all media interactions and by extension all literacy experiences as successful attention purchases by large market forces both blew my mind and made me feel a lack of agency over my own life and literacies. If I sit down to have a beer and watch a football game, what is buying my attention? The NFL? A brewery? The companies advertising? A specific franchise? ESPN? My TV producers? If I go for a run and listen to an audiobook, what has purchased my attention, and who has profited? My gym? My shoe company? Fitbit? Voice actors? An author? And in reading Watkins’s text in what ways and by whom and what has my attention being cultivated and used? Perhaps I’m to susceptible to the arguments of written texts, or perhaps my attention is too easily purchased.

This week’s readings offer a breadth of examples of how writing and literacy entangle in individuals economic lives and larger socio-political environments. Edwards’s piece, written largely in the form of a literature review, provides a thorough introduction to the ways in which literacy scholarship and economic scholarship have historically interacted. Lorimer Leonard tells the stories of two women with similar language literacy resources who find the economic valuing of their skills very different. Mao presents the potential of hybrid discourse to impower typically disempowered rhetors. Bawarshi’s text proposes an emphasis on genre and transfer in first year writing curriculums. Scott’s text focused on the similarities between quantification of market values and quantification, through assessment, of academic labor. Edwards’s text ends with the telling remark that in many ways computers have taken the place of land as sites of production. These last three mentioned points—Bawarshi’s, Scott’s, and Edwards’s—are those which I would like to place in conversation with each other and unpack. In regards to Scott’s point, I had never previously considered the providing of numerical grades as similar to the pricing of commodities in an economic market. I was left thinking: How does this business-like valuation affect the way we teach and what we teach? Bawarshi’s emphasis on emphasis on transfer and genre paired with Edwards’s assertion that computers are now the site of production helped me to consider and answer this self-posed question. As an educator, I feel I am constantly being pulled to teach transferable, computer-based skill sets, and in my case, I could substitute the term marketable for the terms transferable and computer-based. Not only do I ask myself: How can I construct assignments so that the work will benefit students outside of the classroom in the capitalist work environment? But also my students ask: How will this be applicable to my professional career? Students calculate economic relevance while I calculate a grade—an institutionally mandated critique of labor which mirrors/foreshadows the wages/salary that will be attached to students’ career labor. Through a text-informed reflection I am left answering my question—How does a business-like valuation affect the way we teach and what we teach?—with the answer that despite my own reservations—and resistant in the form of contract grading—capitalistic economies largely govern my classroom practices.

In reflecting on Deborah Brandt’s The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, following both my reading of the text and participation in class discussion, the concept and critique of ghostwriting keeps running through my mind. Specifically, I have been considering the economic power dynamics at play within ghostwriter-represented party relationships. Brandt says that, in hiring ghostwriters, “clients lend their status or position to the ghostwriter,” and this authorization “serves both practical and integrity functions for the ghostwriter” (43). In addition to the client conferring power onto the author, the writer, as Brandt also addresses, lends power in literacy skills to the client. Brandt refers to her subjects’ referral to the ghostwriting experience as a having a “puppet quality” or “a producer-director role” (43). However, it is not entirely clear throughout the various description of ghostwriter and ghostwritee relationships if who is the puppet and who is the puppeteer remains consistent. In my own experiences ghostwriting, I can think of a striking example of times both when I as a ghostwriter stood in the position of power and control and also when I wrote as a puppet rather than a puppeteer. I will reflect on those experiences now in an effort to further understand the power dynamics at play in ghostwriter literacy exchanges. Several years ago my family member had to write a number of important petition letters that affected their academic standing. This family member was not in a position of power and had limit experiences with this type of literacy activity. My family decided that I should write the petition letters. In this role as a ghostwriter, I assumed the agency of this specific family member in a way that disenfranchised their authority within our family but enfranchised them outside of the family. In this situation, I, as a ghostwriter, held control. Last year, I interviewed for a job. During the interview, I was told I would be writing in the name of the individual hiring me, and in the name of his boss. In this position, which I did not accept, I, as literacy resource, would have been the lowest rung on the workplace ladder. I was being asked to write—providing exaggerated information—as if I was a person I had never even spoken to or met. Though one position offered me a position of power and the other a position of subordination, in both positions my writing worked to enhance the appearance of other peoples’ literacy skills and in both positions my efforts were never publicly acknowledged. I wonder to what extent this tendency to ghostwrite occurs in non-recognized setting and environments. How can literacy researchers consider this as they methodologically construct their research?

Through this course, I hope to have a better understanding of the connections between literacies and economies, and I hope that this knowledge will help shape the ways I teach literacy, as a concept, to my undergraduate students. Through reading and exploring the course texts, I would also like to gain knowledge about methodologies for studying literacy.

In her “Introduction” and second chapter of Producing Good Citizens, Amy Wan offers a brief introduction to how literacy—though held up as an ideal tool in securing equality, liberation, security, and citizenship—has actually been used to reinforce hierarchical class and racial divisions in many circumstances. Wan’s “Introduction” specifically overviews how critiquing “literacy as a mechanism of citizenship that appears to reconcile inequality” can bring to light the “limitations of a model of citizenship disproportionately focused on participation” (9). Wan’s second chapter “Literacy Training, Americanization, and the Cultivation of the Productive Worker Citizen” further explains this understanding through an examination of literacy practices developed as part of mid 1910s through 1920s Americanization movements. These practices included such things as companies requiring immigrant employees to take English language and American citizenship classes with content that reinforced the American “boot-straps” mentality and sought to avoid unionization and communist leanings. Though such classes were presented as advancement opportunities, they actually reflected a “explicit shaping of the habits of citizenship” (“Literacy” 69) that reinforced the class divides many of the literacy students were seeking to overcome. Wan draws a parallel between her work and that of Catherine Prendergast saying that just as Prendergast asserts that equal legal rights to education do not always result in material equality in education, Wan argues that equal legal citizenship rights do not reflect equal material opportunity. Whereas Wan critiques the entanglement of literacy and citizenship, Prendergast examines and critiques the links between literacy and racial inequality. Prendergast’s “Introduction: The Tangled History of Literacy and Racial Justice” defines the “‘ideology’ of literacy” as “flawed but rhetorically seductive and seemingly deathless argument that literacy will guarantee equality of opportunity, moral growth, and financial security” (4). The concept of the ideology of literacy reflects Harvey Graff’s concept of “the literacy myth” as unsubstantiated belief in the ability of literacy to solve all societal problems. Throughout her introduction and in her essay “The Economy of Literacy: How the Supreme Court Stalled the Civil Rights Movement,” Prendergast critiques this view of literacy as an equalizer by examining how literacy has been situationally used by whites to disenfranchise African Americans. Prendergast reexamines several Supreme Court Cases, namely Brown, to display ways in which such cases reinforced rather than counter a white ownership of and control over literacy.