What it Means to Be Literate

"""In What It Means to Be Literate, Elisabeth L. Miller challenges long-held assumptions about the relationship between embodiment, literacy, and disability as she takes a disability materiality look at literate practices navigated by people experiencing aphasia. In helping us listen to stories about literacy, she also pushes readers to recognize the layers of stigma and ableism that are part of everyday literacy experiences, but which are not always readily recognized in combination. This is a necessary read for anyone interested in literacy studies or disability studies for understanding the complex interrelationships between literacy and disability."" --Stephanie Kerschbaum, University of Washington ""This manuscript has the potential to be a classic, in the sense that, even though we teach about literacy inexhaustibly in writing, rhetoric, and composition classrooms at all levels, we don't have much good material to understand how people with disabilities shape new literate possibilities around a series of barriers and false boundaries. And because anyone who gets constructed as less literate or illiterate is also--en route--constructed as disabled; and because disabled people have traditionally built their own rich literacies within their relationships, cultures, and communities; and because we all need to do this work on an ongoing basis, adapting and altering our literacies--for all of these reasons everyone needs to care deeply about the relationship of disability and literacy."" --Jay Dolmage, University of Waterloo"