Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.
Non-UMass Amherst users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Dissertations that have an embargo placed on them will not be available to anyone until the embargo expires.
Author ORCID Identifier
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
English
Year Degree Awarded
2020
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Rebecca Lorimer Leonard
Second Advisor
Haivan V. Hoang
Third Advisor
Julie Hemment
Subject Categories
Rhetoric and Composition
Abstract
Using a qualitative approach through interview data and a grounded theory methodology, this dissertation focuses on the literacy practices of immigrant families from various former Soviet Republics, primarily Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants in the Boston area. The immigrant literacy users in my study developed reading and writing strategies within spaces of contingency, flux, and danger in order to survive. By interviewing these immigrants who are now in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, the study asks first, how these elders pass on literacy and language practices to their family members, and second, what the members of that family gain through the passing of these practices. These narratives recount lifetimes of literacy experience during times of war and migration and are particularly valuable as the field of literacy studies looks toward methodologies that triangulate how people use and pass literacies across countries and generations. The analysis of this data shows that elders pass to their children and grandchildren what is termed in this project as “safeguard literacies.” That is, elders’ literacy and language practices were developed in times of extreme duress, and the narratives show how safeguard literacies are passed onto children and grandchildren in order to build intergenerational connective networks, to provide access to cultural and familial “storehouses,” and to enable their progeny’s survival by showing them how to read circumspectly not just texts but a world that is always changing. By centering multilingual immigrant elders’ narratives about literacy use during times of war and migration, this study pushes against approaches that delimit language use to nation state affiliation and assimilation; rather, the immigrant elders in this study convey that their literacies, rather than being a result of deficit or lack, develop in spite of, and because of, precarity and offer powerful and flexible strategies that last across time and space.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/18503692
Recommended Citation
Krichevsky, Jenny, "Passing Literacies: Soviet Immigrant Elders and Intergenerational Language Practice" (2020). Doctoral Dissertations. 2042.
https://doi.org/10.7275/18503692
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2042
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.