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111 7. Toward a Labor Economy of Literacy: Academic Frictions Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu Increases, and demands for further increases, in the volume and velocity of global traffic in peoples, goods, services, capital, and information are forcing literacy scholars and teachers to revise their models of literacy and literacy instruction. In this chapter, we review the ways in which two dominant models of literacy now circulating address the challenges such traffic poses: a “foundationalist” model of literacy and an “accommodationist ” model. These two models, we argue, treat language difference and the labor of communicative activity in ways that preclude the possibility, and ignore the reality, of the transformation of language(s) and knowledge that recent scholarship on translingual literacies, English as a lingua franca (hereafter, ELF), and world Englishes demonstrates to be the case.1 Drawing on that scholarship, we argue instead for a model of literacy as translation that highlights the necessity and contribution of the labor of readers and writers for the production and transformation of meaning. We identify this labor with the concept of “friction” introduced by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005) as a corrective to dominant conceptions of the global “flow” of capital. Tsing’s concept of friction reintroduces agency to language users by highlighting the necessity of their labor to the (re)construction of meaning out of language in reading and writing. By treating translation as a constant and inevitable feature of language use, such a model of literacy recognizes and makes visible the necessity of readers’ and writers’ concrete labor to the production of meaning and hence to the economy of reading, writing, and knowing, the friction necessary to the work of academic literacy. We begin by identifying and comparing the language assumptions, curricula , and pedagogies of two dominant models of “academic literacy” circulating within composition studies, the field most directly charged with producing such literacy. A comparison of these models shows that despite significant differences in their assumptions and in the curricula and pedagogies to which they lead, they are aligned in their valuation of communicative Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu 112 efficiency and language commodification and, concomitantly, their elision of readers’ and writers’ labor in the production of meaning. This alignment, we show, supports a technocratic view of academic literacy aligned with fast capitalist, neoliberal ideology’s valuation of speed in the “flow” of information , goods, services, and capital. Within that ideology, difference is treated as a problem to be overcome rather than a condition for meaning insofar as it impedes the speed of that “flow.” The Foundationalist Model of Academic Literacy What we are terming the “foundationalist” model treats academic literacy as a universal, uniform, and fixed set of linguistic and notational conventions and procedures that writers are to follow. Adherence to these is, in this model, the necessary and sufficient means by which thought is to be represented and communicated. Conversely, any deviation from these is linked to the production of reader confusion (associated with the writer’s confusion represented by such deviation) and thus to be eliminated. Language difference thus constitutes a problem to be overcome through adherence to universal conventions and practices of academic literacy.2 Agency is located precisely in such adherence, and hence in the conventions and practices themselves, rather than in writers or readers. Power relations operating among readers and writers are denied; instead, literacy is deemed a politically neutral technology by which meaning is transmitted, and any difficulties experienced are thus treated as technical failures. Those accepting this model of academic literacy adopt a pedagogy of transmission. Whether through direct instruction or apprenticeship/immersion , that pedagogy aims to transmit the conventions and practices thought to be universal attributes of academic literacy to students, and to eradicate deviations from these. In this model, writing and reading are conceived of entirely in terms of meaning transmission, smooth or interrupted. While it is recognized that there is a process whereby students develop fluency with academic literacy, it is assumed, drawing from cognitivist theories of language acquisition, that this process is uniform and linear in direction .3 This approach takes curricular form in requirements for all college students to pass a single course or set of courses to prepare them to meet the demands for academic literacy in the rest of their subsequent academic careers. Although there are few advocates for this view of academic literacy in current literacy and composition scholarship, it inheres in the design of many composition curricula and is prevalent in the...

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