Authorizing genres

What happens of value in the literacy places I study? I just read Gutierrez’s article about syncretic literacies, and found myself questioning on whose terms powerful learning for marginalized youth might happen. Part of learning is socially-defined; what we need is new terms for recognizing learning. Propping each others’ learning up as legitimate. I think I could productively study this with the dataset I have from my dissertation, identifying genre-authorization as a practice, and tracing how readership of stories became a mechanism for its uptake. Another critical practice.

Generally, how do I feel about the framing of ‘syncretic literacies’? Do they center power? Certainly, Gutierrez doesn’t want to be read as advocating a melting pot. But I feel it’s there. @hill1999, one of Gutierrez’s sources for the genealogy of syncretism, herself cites Kuryłowicz as the original importer of the term from religious studies into linguistics. He defined it as “suppression of a relevant opposition under certain determined conditions,” reinforcing the etymological claim that syn-cretism indexes the union of disparate people in Crete. As a practice, syncretism allows speakers to “render obscure the retrievable histories of particular expressive modalities” (p. 245).

“In contrast to models that dichotomize home and school or youth culture and school,” [@gutierrez2014syncretic, p. 49] the issue isn’t just dichotomization, but also essentialism.

This is part of what draws me to thinking about transliteracies, with the emphasis on learning as movement. Gutierrez’s framing has three criteria, one of which is that syncretic literacies “seek to maimain the value, history, and integrity of the everyday genre vis-a-vis the dominant form, especially in light of historical power relations” (p. 49). How does this happen with something like CS?

The critical discourse model is like a social design experiment, but

I am particularly interested in contexts where interpretive and indexical possibilities can be explored. To a much greater extent than in traditional prose narrative, the author of an interactive story can script not just what appears, but the ways it comes to mean, how the story world reacts to a player’s actions. This makes interactive stories potentially-powerful critical discourse models for exploring transliteracy practices.

Empirical study of syncretism in Hacker News???