ABSTRACT

This text provides an in-depth exploration of rural community literacy, examining the ways in which community-building, social networks, time, race, and politics interplay.

Mapping the dense literacy sponsorship network of a small rural town in the southeastern United States, Nichols offers a window into the challenges and successes of collective literacy sponsorship. Through an original mapping-focused approach, the book explores multiple social and environmental layers that construct literacy sponsorship writ large.

This approach provides a novel methodological entry to rural literacies and will be key reading for rural community literacy advocates, literacy scholars, graduate students, and researchers.

chapter |18 pages

Introduction

An Ecological Approach to Rural Literacies

chapter 2|10 pages

Interlude on Researcher Positionality

chapter 3|15 pages

Sketching a Literacy Sponsorship Network

Visualization as Method and Rhetorical Practice

chapter 4|13 pages

Functional Ecologies

Collective Collaboration in Abbyville's Literacy Sponsorship Network

chapter 5|18 pages

Functional Ecologies

Collective Maintenance of Abbyville's Literacy Sponsorship Network

chapter 7|9 pages

Not Always What, But How

Study Ethics, Methods, and Methodologies

chapter 8|11 pages

Conclusion

Futures for Researching Small Literacy Sponsorship Networks