This is my wedding photograph. We were married on the eighteenth of November 1972. This photo is important to me because it was my 25th wedding anniversary and my sister brought me the frame. That’s the only wedding photo I’ve got that I can find at the moment.

Peggy

Peggy’s description of her wedding photograph (Fig. 1.1) comes from a tour she gave me of her new home, a one-bedroom flat in which she lives alone. She moved here after living for 33 years in the three-bedroom house where she had raised her three children.

Upon moving, Peggy was faced with many decisions about what she would take with her and where she would put it. Amongst the items on display in her new flat are framed photographs of her family: her husband, her mothe r, father, brothers and sister, nephews and nieces, her three children, her grandchildren and newborn great-grandchildren. These form part of what Peggy calls her “special things”: the things she has carefully selected to take with her to her new home.

I’ve been very harsh with myself but there are some things I’ll never part with even though I ain’t got room to put them in.

In a corner of her living room, Peggy has a cabinet, the top half of which has a glass door through which ornaments are displayed. This is where Peggy keeps her special things. These include items of china, which feature Queen Elizabeth II, bought for her by her mother “because I was born in 1952”, the year of the queen’s accession to the throne. There is a champagne flute bought for her by her granddaughters on the occasion of her 60th birthday. Sitting in a teacup in this cabinet is a tiny teddy bear, and Peggy reaches for this in order to tell me its story:

This teddy bear here was the last thing my husband ever bought me. He died nine years ago. When I went to see him in hospital, he’d got this teddy bear sticking out his pocket and he says, “I bought it especially for you”. So I keep that on show.

Moving and settling into a new house has focused Peggy’s mind on what things mean: what they mean to her, and what she would like them to mean about her. Having her things “on show” is a way for Peggy to curate her life experience, and the feelings of pride, joy, love, and loss that have come with it. Her new flat provides a frame within which we are able to see Peggy’s life as she wants to present it.

The move to her new flat was not something Peggy had planned. Six months before her move, during a visit to Peggy’s house for our discussions about reading and writing in her everyday life, she explained:

In April, they’ll charge you for the two bedrooms that you’re not using – it’s called a ‘bedroom tax’ – and I said to [my daughter], “I can’t afford to live here”.

The policy referred to by Peggy was part of a raft of reform to welfare services introduced by the government that came to power in the UK in 2010. Officially known as the “under-occupation penalty” , the policy was aimed at tenants of social housing “whose accommodation is larger than they need” (Department for Work and Pensions 2013) . As of April 1st 2013, the policy cut the housing benefit of those affected by up to 25%. As Moussa Haddad (2012, p. 32) has pointed out, at the time of the policy’s announcement, the number of social housing tenants deemed to be “under-occupying” was three times greater than the number of homes available for them to move into, “thus making the penalty essentially punitive”. Public discourse quickly saw this policy dubbed “the bedroom tax”, and, as Mary O’Hara notes (2015, p. 61), it “quickly became an emblematic symbol of the government’s cuts programme, provoking a blend of bafflement and fury” that triggered protests across the UK, “including outside and inside Parliament” (ibid.).

Peggy was one of the many affected by this welfare policy, forced by their circumstances to find somewhere new to live. Our meetings over subsequent weeks included Peggy’s updates on this process, and over the course of the next few months, as she prepared to move to her new flat, Peggy shared her feelings about the move.

I’m a bit unsure about moving because it’s the memories in the house […] Me and [my husband] and the kids growing up and that.

These are the memories which Peggy worked to capture and display in her new home, in response to the circumstances in which she was placed by government policy.

There is more of Peggy’s story in Chap. 7, including how recent paradigms in literacy research can help us to understand the creative and resourceful approaches to meaning making which are part of everyday responses to wider contexts. Peggy’s is one of a series of portraits of literacy in the everyday lives of participants who took part in an ethnographic research¹ project which looked at the literacy practices of residents living on a predominantly white working class council housing estate on the edge of a Midlands city. Drawing on the individual portrait presented in each chapter, there is a focus on a different way in which literacy can be viewed. This ranges from the ways in which literacy is imagined within official institutions, including schools and local authority welfare provision, as a measurable and individual skillset, through to the multifaceted ways of understanding literacy that have emerged in more recent years, including the role of the material artefacts in how we make meanings and communicate these to each other, as we have seen in Peggy’s experience of moving house.

By looking at the role played by literacy in everyday experiences, and examining insights from across four decades in the field of literacy studies, the book explicitly positions literacy as a helpful lens to explore issues of social justice. This is part of a long-standing agenda within the field of literacy studies which has followed on from the call by Street (1993, p. 2) for “bold theoretical models that recognise the central role of power relations in literacy practices”, and work which has explicitly foregrounded the question of power in relation to literacy (Collins and Blot 2003). The particularly acute challenges posed by the specific context of the socioeconomic policies of “austerity”, and the continued mandating of narrowed models of literacy, mean that there remains an acute need to articulate the multifaceted role of literacy in social justice. The role of literacy in the increasing constriction of everyday lives, through a restricted view of what counts as reading and writing in policy, and in the systems through which it is enacted, is seen in examples throughout the book and described in more detail in Chaps. 3 and 4. Alongside this, the lens of literacy can also be useful to illustrate its role in constructing everyday lives, as a resource in the often creative, resourceful, and collaborative responses to wider contexts which are part of everyday life. The portraits in Chaps. 5, 6, and 7 offer a direct challenge to the cycle of reductive stereotyping which has been used to justify “austerity” policies and which has echoes across time to Victorian notions of the undeserving poor.

This chapter began with Peggy’s description of her most treasured photo frame. The frame is a key concept that runs throughout the book, and I move now to focus on its centrality to the link between literacy and justice. I am drawing here on the work of Nancy Fraser, who sees “the question of the frame as the central question of justice in a globalizing world” (2010, p. 29). The frame is a fundamental element of Fraser’s three-dimensional model of justice. This model reminds us of the need to consider the complex intertwining of forces in everyday life. It is therefore a useful framework through which to examine literacy practice as part of that complex intertwining.