Humanizing Literacies: Abundance, Resistance, and Community

Abstract

This dissertation explores how people in one collection of Indianapolis neighborhoods known as the United Near Northwest Area (UNWA) practice literacy as a way of shaping, repairing, and imagining their communities. Rather than studying reading and writing only in schools, it asks: Who and what is literacy? When and where does it happen? What do community literacies do, and what possibilities do they open? Guided by posthuman and decolonial perspectives, the project examines how everyday acts—storytelling on porches, neighborhood walks, poetry, gardens, murals, and local projects—function as literacies that both expose and resist the lingering structures of settler colonialism as they work to build new alternatives beyond the settler colonial imaginary. Through years of collaboration with a community collective in the area, residents, and numerous organizations within UNWA, the research uses relational and gift inquiry—methods grounded in reciprocity and shared authorship—to study literacy as something made through assemblages and relationships between people and places. The project finds that literacy operates less as a set of skills and more as a relational force: it is how people notice, name, and nurture the worlds they inhabit together. These literacies create “regenerative narratives”—stories that do not simply describe change but generate it, cultivating futures beyond deficit and dispossession. The work also reflects on what it means to be a “desettled” researcher: how studying decolonization requires unlearning the habits of extraction and mastery inherited from academic traditions. Findings suggest that literacy, when understood through relation rather than hierarchy, becomes a practice of attention and care—a way the world keeps coming into being through our noticing and entanglement. The project proposes that literacy is an unfinished, always becoming, collective practice of reading, writing, and repairing the public record of who we are and who we might still become that can challenge and potentially rework the illiteracy of settler colonialism.