ogs/sshrc draft --comments?

hey folks--long time no chat! mind taking a gander at the following proposal and dropping in your 2 cents? thanks -k

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Several decades ago, Su Braden proposed that the new kind of critical literacy afforded by photochemical, electronic, and digital communications technologies was limited by our conventional notions of what constitutes “literacy.” The public’s capacities to understand and communicate through a wide variety of symbolic forms—not simply the written word—remained inconsequential, she argued, as long as written language predominated and was institutionalized.

Despite the proliferation of images and image-making technologies that characterize our contemporary cultural existence nearly 30 years later, our institutions seem more bound to the written word—not less—than ever before. In a culture where anti-bullying by-laws are adopted to protect a school board’s teachers as much as its students, and where the equivalent of a EULA (an End User Licensing Agreement) can dictate how one “operates” a package of fresh green grapes, it is apparent that a proficiency in manipulating the written word remains a singularly powerful ability. Yet, as I intend to argue, this is an ability that is not entirely inevitable.

This doctoral research project has two primary aims. First, to document and theorize communicative practices that exist outside of mainstream, text-centered institutional settings. This will entail a case-study exploration of several arts-based practices, including sustained field research in at least one community arts setting, and with at least one visual arts cooperative organization. The second aim of this research is to articulate how visual experience might be better developed and understood as a component of democratic participation in mainstream society. More specifically, this project will suggest how elements of a visual “literacy”—that is, learning about visual rhetoric and skill-development with image-based technologies—might complement and extend traditional literacy strategies, both to support the imperative of text-based language learning, and to provide engaging alternatives to those marginalized from traditional language learning strategies.