From Atlanta to Nicosia … Travel notes from two international conferences

Professor Jennifer Rowsell

On November 24th, 2023, I flew to Atlanta, USA for the Literacy Research Association (LRA) Conference and its 2023 theme was Interrogating Hierarchies: Building a Humanitarian Literacy Research Architecture that Binds and I am grateful to the School for travel funds to attend the conference.

The LRA conference is always a chance to connect with North American researchers and I find that there is a powerful and political edge to the research presented at the conference that provokes literacy researchers. This conference did not disappoint, and I attended a number of sessions on literacy and critical race theory, literacy and decolonising the curriculum, literacy in the age of AI, and expansive lens for digital literacy research — a carousel of contemporary issues in literacy education. I presented in two sessions at the conference. One session featured a panel on key literacy journals and Dr. Christian Ehret and I talked about Reading Research Quarterly. As Co-Editors with Natalia Kucirkova and Cheryl McLean, we spoke to the challenges that we had in our first year as editors alongside progress, even successes during the year. The second session explored sensory and affect-driven research on digital learning.

After a lovely weekend in Savannah and four days in Atlanta, I then fly back to the UK and immediately onto Nicosia, Cyprus for the Literacy and Contemporary Society: Creativity, Equity, and Social Action Conference. This literacy conference is an annual conference at the University of Cyprus and Dr. Stavroula Kontovourki is the Conference Organiser and she invited me to give a keynote on Monday Dec. 4th, the first day of the conference. The title of the talk was, “Opening the Digital Blackbox: Unpacking and nuancing digital-material education” based on a book that I am writing entitled, The Comfort of Screens: Literacy in Post-Digital Times (Cambridge University Press). By serendipity and good luck, Dr Jess Bradley and Dr Lou Harvey were also at a different sociolinguistic conference in Nicosia and we were able to have dinner together. I loved both trips and it felt really good to connect with international researchers in person after such a long time.

Jennifer Rowsell is Professor of Digital Literacy in The School of Education, The University of Sheffield.