This project works to bring together a network of international and interdisciplinary researchers, practitioners, and artists to contextualise and make tangible an existing theoretical perspective on ‘literacies’ – practices which allow us to make sense of and meaning in the world. Led by researchers working from craft-based (PI Lisa Bradley) and design-led (Co-I Lisa Grocott, Monash University) perspectives, the network will specifically work to co-surface and tether the theory of Pluriversal Literacies (Perry, 2021; 2023) to diverse contexts of people and place; and co-design a pathway for putting Pluriversal Literacies practices into action via responsive tools and methods.

Network activities take place in person and online, exploring practices which support participants to relate to and learn from one another. The work begins from the limits of participants’ disciplinary and experiential boundaries. Initial meetings aim to support acknowledgment of participants’ own illiteracies, and reflections on what has been overvalued, undervalued and excluded in their practices.

The grant runs from January 2024 – December 2026 and aims to:

1. Establish genuine ethical partnerships by developing a network of people with diverse agendas, positions, and practices of knowledge production.
2. Co-create a theoretical framework that will resonate across disciplines and context by always thinking with practice and through situated contexts.
3. Co-design a pathway to impact that identifies additional strategic partnerships that can support the preconditions necessary for PL education to be valued and actionable.
4. Model, through experiential inquiry encounters, an engagement with PL that surfaces and animates how these literacies connect back to network participants’ existing place-based practices.

References

Perry, M. (2021) Pluriversal literacies: affect and relationality in vulnerable times. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(2), pp. 293-309. (doi: 10.1002/rrq.312)

Perry, M. (2023) Pluriversal Literacies for Sustainable Futures - When Words Are Not Enough. London: Routledge

Network Participants:

Sharifa Abdulla (theatre, applied theatre) UofG, UK.

Diane Collier (literacies education) Brock University, Canada.

Myf Doughty (curator) Monash University, Australia.

Stacy Holman-Jones (theatre, autotheory) Monash University, Australia.

Gehan Macleod (craft, community engagement) GalGael, UK.

Carmen Medina (arts education) Indiana University, Bloomington.

Nancy Palacios Mena (land literacies, education) University de los Andes, Colombia.

Mia Perry (arts and literacies in education) UofG, UK.

Mindy Ptolomey (arts-based research, disability) Glasgow Caledonian, UK.

Marcela Ramos (journalism, education, agriculture) UofG, UK.

Jennifer Rowsell (literacies education) University of Sheffield, UK.

Mary Savig (craft, curator) Smithsonian Institution, USA.

Shanti Sumartojo (ethnography and human geography) Monash University, Australia.

Rakhat Zholdoshalieva (policy, international communications) UNESCO.