Department of English

This book demonstrates how researchers and practitioners in writing and rhetoric studies can engage in story work across differences in culture, language, locations, and experience. Based on an ethnographic study in Nepal spanning a decade, Author Katie Silvester speaks with and to the stories of Bhutanese women in diaspora learning English later in life during resettlement and in the context of waves of social change brought on by the end of their asylum. In the process, she demonstrates how researchers and practitioners in writing and rhetoric studies might:

• Engage in literacy work across differences in culture, language, location, and experience;
• Reconfigure and reformulate with others how we come to understand the literacy, hope, and violence in specific migrations; and
• Use the stories that students bring with them to the classroom about their backgrounds to promote literacy learning.

The stories in this book aren’t just powerful; as the world becomes smaller and instructors everywhere find themselves teaching students of increasingly diverse backgrounds, this book provides insight for teaching literacies across cultural landscapes.