Mosaïque is a research network for studies in literacy, discourse, and society. With members from different institutions, we are located at the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) at McGill University. Our members share their research about language and literacy education with one another and with interested audiences who are in contact with Mosaïque. We welcome diverse perspectives on literacy and together create a mosaic of different understandings of linguistic and literate engagement.
Mosaïque is intended to create space for conversations about organic literacies such as oracy, community literacy, grassroots cultural production, land-based literacies, genre hybridity, disruptive interdisciplinarity, and similar concepts. These organic literacies impact relations of power as forms of resistance against discourse control exerted by colonial literacies, linguistic imperialism, academic colonialism, and canonical literature.
We acknowledge the use of multiple linguistic and multimodal sign systems that individuals draw upon when engaging in literacy practices across various domains: from writing a letter in everyday life, to sharing strategies in an online community, to producing a digital video for a high school project. Mosaïque, therefore, focuses on literacy as a social practice in which people draw on their diverse cultural histories to produce texts and make meaning.
In today's world, people are on the move more than ever, and they bring their cultures, histories, and embodied ways of being into transnational flows of ideas and practices, both off- and online. Similarly, people bring their entanglements with natural world, and the natural world itself affects the movements and practices of literacy, such as when the changing climate affects activist literacies, or a virus forces new forms of communication and social connection online. Mosaïque understands mobility, embodiment, and the more-than-human as both content and process in the contemporary practice of literacies. Literacies, more than ever, are on the move, and are moved by the natural world.
With a focus on literacy and activism, we recognize that literacy is always ideological, and that diverse communities’ unfettered uses of and access to a wide range of literacies are essential for equitable social change across local-global scales. Additionally, uses of literacy evolve alongside emerging technologies and the practices that human beings develop with their use. Currently, these technologies and technospaces include VR, AI, makerspaces, online affinity spaces, esports arenas, and algorithmically driven data consumption online, especially on social media channels, that have contributed to the practice of literacy in a ‘post-truth’ present. Mosaïque is, therefore, alive to the concerns of the present, and to the uses of literacy for social change toward more just futures.
