LLED Research Seminar Series invites you:
New/digital literacies and the socio-economic empowerment of women: A case study of a Botswana basket-weaving cooperative
Theresa Rogers, Penelope Moanakwena, and Brigid Conteh, UBC
(with Pierre Walter, UBC and Glorious Bolokwe, UB, Ernesto Pena, DLC)
Date/Time: Thursday, April 24, 2014 – 12:30-1:30pm
Location: Digital Literacy Centre, Pon F, room 103
In this project we are exploring how digital literacies can be productively connected to local languages, economies, social capital and sustainable production in one village in northwest Botswana. We draw on convergences among new literacy studies, multimodality, multiliteracies, and, more recently, the broader rubric of “new literacies” (e.g. Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear & Leu, 2008). Taken together, these perspectives help us to view new languages and literacies as practices embedded in social activity that can be best understood in relation to specific cultural contexts. Other areas of research central to this study are adult literacy, gender and community development (Rogers, 1999; Walter, 2005), and the “gender digital divide” in Africa (Eneh, 2010). We will report on the first two phases of our qualitative case study (Stake, 1995) of one group of women basketweavers in Etsha who took up the resources of digital literacies in the context of ongoing workshops to develop and market their baskets. This work supports the women in their goals to receive fair market prices for their craft and to become more financially independent.