Drawing on two years of ethnographic research mixed with archival work, Immigrants, Brokers, and Literacy as Affinity explores literacy’s entanglement in networks of economic and political forces. Ligia A. Mihut proposes and theorizes the figure of the literacy broker, embodied by those who help immigrants with reading and writing as they cross national, cultural, and linguistic borders. Whether these brokers use personal stories, language of empathy, or social connections, they collectively develop an emotional discourse repertoire that Mihut has coined as literacy as affinity. As such, literacy as affinity is explored in various locales where unequal power dynamics may emerge: local communities, schools, libraries, workplaces, or homes. Literacy brokers are intermediaries, advocating for those who, based on their economic, national, or political identity, find themselves reaching for the American dream.

Art, Architecture & Sculpture

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Ahead of the 40-year anniversary of Continuity and Change, the journal’s editors share a special call for papers.

Socially Engaged Public Art

This special issue of Sculpture Journal offers the first sustained, collective study of Westminster Abbey’s sculptural canon. In this blog post guest co-editor Gemma Shearwood provides insight into…

The title of the volume captures the stark absence of the acknowledgement of Whiteness at the core of Anglophone Modernism and in Modernist Studies. What happens when a nation suddenly has “too many women”? After World War I, Britain’s 1921 census indicated there were two million more women than men in the population. Newspapers quickly began publishing letters and opinion pieces about the “problem” of Surplus Women—a generation of unmarried, middle-class women whose very existence was framed as a national crisis.

Short reviews of recent releases.