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Key research themes
1. How do social, economic, and cultural contexts shape reading practices among diverse reader groups?
This research theme investigates how readers' backgrounds—including socioeconomic status, historical disadvantage, group identities, and community influences—affect their access to reading, reading cultures, and interpretative practices. Understanding these contextual factors is critical to addressing inequalities in reading engagement and literacy development and revealing how cultural capital and social positioning influence both the opportunities to read and the meanings constructed from texts.
Key finding: This ethnographic and discursive study of a US urban middle school amidst pedagogical reform reveals tensions between imposed educational standards and autonomous reading identities, especially among students facing literacy... Read more
Key finding: Ethnographic research of a Kardecist spiritist study group in Brazil uncovers the role of collective reading practices in constructing group religious identity. The printed religious texts serve not only as doctrinal... Read more
Key finding: Ethnographic research in Delhi contextualizes reading as a social practice intersecting with urban public spaces such as metro systems and bookshops, revealing how multilingualism, caste, gender, and globalization shape... Read more
Key finding: Presenting a comprehensive methodology integrating participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and multi-context data collection in school, community, and home settings, this paper demonstrates the importance of... Read more
2. What are the embodied, social, and environmental dimensions of reading practices in contemporary settings?
This theme explores how reading extends beyond isolated cognitive acts to encompass embodied experiences influenced by social presence, spatial environments, and materiality of texts and reading devices. It considers how physical settings, co-present others, and multimodality engage readers in socially situated, corporeally grounded reading experiences, thus challenging traditional conceptions of reading as purely mental or individual.
Key finding: Qualitative focus group research across six European countries reveals that readers exhibit varied sensitivities to the physical presence and activities of others in their reading environments, such as home or library.... Read more
Key finding: This cultural sociology editorial introduces the concept of reading as not only an instrumental act but also a sacred social practice, deeply entwined with ritual, identity, and cultural hierarchy. It argues that reading's... Read more
Key finding: An ethnographic study of a non-academic Israeli women's reading group analyzing a Hebrew translation of Coleridge's 'Christabel' demonstrates how collaborative reading processes reveal and revive textual meanings through... Read more
Key finding: The article argues for an anthropological approach to literary reading that emphasizes the lived, everyday contexts and subjective interpretations of readers beyond psychological or sociological frameworks. Through... Read more
3. How can critical and ethnographic methodologies advance the conceptualization and study of reading as a complex social practice?
This research focus addresses the theoretical and methodological innovations that ethnography and critical studies bring to the analysis of reading. It interrogates traditional literacy models, incorporates sociolinguistic and cultural sociology perspectives, and proposes integrated frameworks capturing reading’s situated, multi-dimensional, and contested nature. These approaches emphasize empirical grounding, reflexivity, reader agency, and power relations in reading research.
Key finding: This comprehensive review contextualizes ethnographic methods within literacy studies, clarifying the distinction between literacy events and literacy practices and demonstrating how ethnography uncovers the situated,... Read more
Key finding: Introducing 'critical studies of reading' as a novel interdisciplinary approach, this paper identifies seven defining features emphasizing siding with the reader, empirically grounded analyses of reading as socially and... Read more
Key finding: Content analysis of teacher training notebooks from Brazil's National Pact for Literacy reveals that reading is conceived as an interactive cognitive act between reader and text, with pedagogical practices prioritizing... Read more
Key finding: Presenting a layered ethnographic methodology combining participant observation, videotaping, and multiple-site data collection, this study exemplifies how ethnography can accurately capture the socially and contextually... Read more
Key finding: Applying ethnomethodology to classroom reading lessons, this paper argues for understanding reading practices as locally rational actions embedded in normative cultural orders. The study emphasizes how detailed analysis of... Read more