Graduate students from our Theories of Literacy course are sharing insights from our weekly sessions in weekly blog posts. They’ll rotate the responsibility throughout the fall 2025 semester, sharing how we’re making sense of the ideas that emerge in our time together.

We began this week with a collaborative reading of the introductory chapter to The Material Culture of Writing in Perusall, where we continued our consideration of the material objects that facilitate our literacies. Haleigh pointed to the importance of material culture studies (MCS) when she commented, “Objects and rituals influence how our writing happens. Even though they shape our process, we rarely acknowledge their contributions to the actual writing.” Reflecting on a broader pattern in our society, Jordan observed, “this is kind of symptomatic of a capitalist society who only cares for the end product and not ‘how the sausage gets made.’” Elsewhere in our online discussion we considered the intersections of consumer culture and identity. (Other) Hailey wondered about the extent to which their own writing process likely differs simply for owning a MacBook instead of another brand of laptop, which would provide different writing features.

 

In a society that places a higher value on the final product, we tend to have a greater awareness of what our writing accomplishes than what we use to accomplish the writing. MCS helps us understand how writing tools and paraphernalia themselves affect our habits. To illustrate the impact of physical objects on our behavior, Julian shared his thought experiment, in which he compared writing with cooking: “When I cook, I’m in my kitchen. I’m not just anywhere; I’m in MY kitchen. I would feel differently, and act differently, if I were to cook in someone else’s kitchen. And once I move to a new house, I won’t be the exact same cook. I’ll have a lot of knowledge and experience, but I’ll still have to get used to the new kitchen—I’ll have a to construct a slightly new identity for that new space.” Julian’s metaphor makes it easier to recognize the unconscious ways we adapt to the physical world and to apply these tendencies to our literacy practices.

Despite not yet having read any Latour, we love talking—at times in a spirited manner—about all things Actor-Network Theory, which proposes that non-human entities have just as much potential to shape social outcomes as people do. Dr. Jaxon introduced this idea several weeks ago when she suggested that chairs have agency, made evident by our response to a chair (e.g., sitting in it, facing a particular direction, rocking or reclining). Of course, this is a somewhat radical concept, and not everyone agrees that chairs can tell us what to do. This week, however, even the most stubborn of us admitted that a broken pencil or a dead laptop inevitably changes our human behavior—even if, for some reason, that same agency is still flat out denied to a chair. (I have deliberately avoided attributing this idea to my colleague in the interest of protecting their anonymity.)

Although we may joke about a power struggle with inanimate objects, we also recognize that real-world power imbalances pervade society, and MCS is no exception. In our class-wide Perusall discussion, Lourdes commented, “From a privileged standpoint, it’s easy to assume that material things don’t carry weight because access/non-access might not impact us in the same way.” Such comforts can only be made unconscious when they are at our disposal. In the same thread, Tim replied, “it might be regarded as elitist, or even arrogant, to discuss the agency of objects on a very theoretical level when other people don’t even have access to the material object itself.” Tim’s insight asks us to confront not only our material comforts but also the circumstances that afford us the opportunity to pursue higher education. Fortunately, conversations like these enable us to use our knowledge and positions to benefit others.

As one of two reading options, the chapter “Indexical Heirlooms in Immigrant Literacy History Narratives,” written by Jenny Krichevsky, illustrates the importance of material objects both to literacy practices and to identity. Krichevsky draws on five Soviet immigrant interviews collected from a larger study of how literacy practices are passed intergenerationally and transnationally through material objects. The author deliberately refers to the objects of study as heirlooms—rather than as mere “possessions” of an individual or as broad “cultural artifacts” shared by a population—to recognize them as vehicles capable of transmitting familial identity across time and space (71). Heirlooms also reflect the process of singularization, described by Kopytoff, where a mass-produced commodity becomes “tied to significant identity work in both families’ and individuals’ lives” (72). Krichevsky’s chapter finds that literacy is “a form of adaptation and survival” (70) and that the heirlooms bear a profound influence on the participants’ literacies and identities, perhaps best illustrated by the cases in which heirlooms are absent.

The issue of being “cultured,” or having an aptitude to engage with Russian literature, came up in our break-out discussion about Krichevsky’s chapter. Most of the participants in the study place a high value on reading, regardless of social class or profession. As Lourdes pointed out, the term “culturedness” seems like a problematic term, and as Sel responded, it suggests a singular, perhaps elite literacy that does not account for the diverse literacy practices that Soviet immigrants undoubtedly command. Later in the conversation, Tim observed that “culturedness” is likely a shared cultural understanding of what constitutes literacy, shaped by political and educational institutions.

Upon further digging, it would appear that Krichevsky does not use the term “culturedness” to ascribe value or judgment to the participants’ literary practices. The term is uniformly treated with scare quotes, suggesting that Krichevsky wishes to signal a borrowed term provided by the participants themselves rather than one that was imposed upon them.

The participants in Krichevsky’s study also attend to skills and experiences that are readily associated with literacy: learning to read and write, returning to school for an education, memorizing literature, and using literacy skills in a professional capacity. Similar to Brian Street’s finding in “Literacy Events and Literacy Practices” (covered in Lourdes’s blog) that teenagers underreported their reading habits as a result of too narrowly defining what counts as a literacy practice, the subjects of this study similarly do not focus on practical applications of their literacy practices like reading and using patterns for handiwork and craftsmanship (72).

Furthermore, it is Krichevsky that establishes the connection between unlikely heirlooms and literacy, discovering and honoring more diverse literacies. As the author says, “the narratives featured highlight the significant ways in which the material presence or absence of objects shapes their literacy, but it is important to note that these heirlooms appear in nearly all the interview data in this study” (70-1). For the interviewees, these heirlooms are part of their individual and familial identities. It is the author that recognizes the centrality of unexpected heirlooms like pianos, passports, and war medals to literacy practices. Krichevsky writes, discursive heirloom “materiality shapes [the participants’] practices and connects them to certain ways of being like ‘culturedness’ as well as skillful know-how such as craftsmanship and herblore” (77; emphasis added). While participants recount typical literacy events and practices, the author recognizes the surprising yet integral role these heirlooms play in facilitating these expressions.

Other highlights from this reading came out when the class reconvened as a whole. Bradley voiced some small disappointment in a limitation of the reading: Marxist interpretations are used to frame the study (71), but Krichevsky glosses over the fact that a participant’s father had worked with Nadezhda Krupskaya, Vladimir Lenin’s wife, and a revolutionary figure (76). If Krichevsky explicitly employs Marxist framework, why is Lenin’s ideology left out completely? Or, how might Leninism have shaped the participant’s identity and literacy? Even more simply, why not include a footnote acknowledging the significance of this personal connection to a relevant historical and political figure?

Michelle Rideout is a graduate student in the English MA program at California State University, Chico. Her focus is in literature but, as a lifelong learner, she is equally drawn to rhetoric, composition, and literacy topics, and seemingly anything else that might intersect with language and sociology. In her hypothetical free time she enjoys escaping into the mountains in search of a lake.