Readings for March 11

This week's theme (#2) is "State-sponsored education and literacy efforts, with the goal of bringing the tools for personal and economic advancement to the public in an equitable way."  But we are also doing a special joint meeting with the Anthropology of Media class.  So the readings will be split.

Theme 2 readings:

• Siobhan Stevenson, "Digital divide: A discursive move away from the real ineqiuties," The Information Society (2009).  (Don't be afraid of the heavy theory in this article; it contains a lot of good historical information about how digital divides have been conceptualized over the last 15 years.)
• Deborah Brandt, "Accumulating literacy: How four generations of one American family learned to write," in Literacy in American Lives (2001).
• Renee Hobbs and Amy Jensen, "The past, present, and future of media literacy education," Journal of Media Literacy Education (2009).
• Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (2006).  (This is a long report; read the executive summary at a minimum.)

Joint meeting readings:

• Dana Goodyear, "Letter from Japan: I [heart] Novels," The New Yorker (22 December 2008).
• Gabriella Lukacs, "Dreamwork: Cell phone novelists, labor, and politics in contemporary Japan," Cultural Anthropology 28:1 (2013).

Student assignments:

• Bond and Bard: Stevenson article summary and author info, respectively
• Ineichen and Bottomley: Brandt article summary and author info, respectively
• Meneses-Hall and Marshall: Hobbs and Jensen article summary and author info, respectively
• Zhang and Pegues: Jenkins article summary and author info, respectively
• Boehm and Stalker: Goodyear article summary and author info, respectively 
• Roeder and Toff: Lukacs article summary and author info, respectively
• Pratesi: Come up with some interesting discussion questions on the joint meeting readings (cell phone novelists).