Investigating Ethics in Sociocultural Literacy Studies

Abstract

This conceptual article addresses theories of ethics in literacy studies. Here, ethics means people’s ways of defining, asking about, and living good lives. Although literacy researchers have paid some attention to ethics, they rarely theorize ethics overtly. To demonstrate the need for a clearer concept of the ethical dimension of literacy, this article shows how the author’s earlier study of activists’ literacies was limited by an underdeveloped theory of ethics. The article reviews ideas from recent work in the anthropology of ethics that can draw out and draw together literacy studies’ largely implicit concepts of ethics. Through this discussion, the article presents a clearer theory of the ethical dimension of literacy. The article concludes by using this new theory to study the ethics in the literacy practices of an LGBTQIA activist.