Writing on the Move

Migrant Women and the Value of Literacy

How is literacy revalued as it moves across borders and boundaries? What forms does literate mobility take? What functions does the process of literate valuation perform? Refreshingly insightful and profoundly original, Writing on the Move offers an indispensable framework for theorizing about these questions and for understanding how competing social and economic forces shape, recognize, and regulate migrant literate lives.
LuMing Mao, Miami University

Winner, 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award
Honorable Mention, 2018 Coalition of the Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition Winifred Bryan Horner Award

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Winner of the 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award.

In this book, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard shows how multilingual migrant women both succeed and struggle in their writing contexts. Based on a qualitative study of everyday multilingual writers in the United States, she shows how migrants’ literacies are revalued because they move with writers among their different languages and around the world. Writing on the Move builds a theory of literate valuation, in which socioeconomic values shape how multilingual migrant writers do or do not move forward in their lives. The book details the complicated reality of multilingual literacy, which is lived at the nexus of prejudice, prestige, and power.

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Rebecca Lorimer Leonard

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard is assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Rebecca Lorimer Leonard