Literacy, Play and Globalization

Book excerpt: This book takes on current perspectives on children’s relationships to literacy, media, childhood, markets and transtionalism in converging global worlds. It introduces the idea of multi-sited imaginaries to explain how children’s media and literacy performances shape and are shaped by shared visions of communities that we collectively imagine, including play, media, gender, family, school, or cultural worlds. It draws upon elements of ethnographies of globalization, nexus analysis and performance theories to examine the convergences of such imaginaries across multiple sites: early childhood and elementary classrooms and communities in Puerto Rico and the Midwest United States. In this work we attempt to understand that the local moment of engagement within play, dramatic experiences, and literacies is not a given but is always emerging from and within the multiple localities children navigate and the histories, possibilities and challenges they bring to the creative moment.