Dialogic tracings of lifespan literate activity and/on trajectories of semiotic (un)becoming

The concept of becoming (Prior, 2018; Ware, 2022) addresses Lemke's (2000) key questions of how “moments add up to a life” and how “our shared moments together add up to a social life as such” (p. 273). Becoming (addressing whole persons rather than narrow notions of learning) also addresses a growing interest in writing studies, particularly in scholarship that traces writing across the lifespan (Dippre, 2019). Grounded in dialogic semiotics, cultural-historical approaches to learning, development, and activity, and in Barad’s (2007) agential realism and intra-action, this dissertation develops a theoretical and methodological approach to studying how literate activity (Prior, 1998) contributes to becoming across semiotic trajectories. The dissertation offers documented narratives of individuals who were once deeply religious, practicing clergy members, but who over complex trajectories of becoming lost their faiths and transitioned to secular lives and livelihoods, in part supported by The Clergy Project, an organization founded in 2011 specifically to offer such support. Drawing on audio-and/or-video recorded ethnographic interviews, numerous texts and dialogic animations of those texts, and many other artifacts, this research traces two focal cases (from among 20 research participants) of what I call “trajectories of semiotic (un)becoming” (Prior, 2018; Ware, 2022). The analyses have two, major aims: first, to carefully and responsibly trace the trajectories of semiotic (un)becoming of faith (i.e., how individuals became non-believers) in conjunction with literate activities they employed; and second, to map a dialogic semiotic theoretical-methodological approach for conducting research to trace the literate activity across trajectories of semiotic becoming. The dissertation argues that trajectories of semiotic becoming are necessarily messy and dynamically nonlinear, and that writing studies, as a field, needs flexible, theoretically grounded methods for tracing becoming across lifespan trajectories. The dissertation particularly highlights the value of innovative dialogic animation protocols (geared toward eliciting continued engagement with texts written and artifacts created by participants) and dialogic analyses (analytical procedures that seek to probe the fundamentally historical nature of language, literate practices, and becoming). I argue that dialogic semiotic theoretical and methodological grounding supports dialogic openings, deepening, and enrichment of data, and affords tracing acrossness (how particular stories, practices, and artifacts transform across, but also help facilitate, trajectories of becoming). In the individual case studies, I highlight the key ways that literate activity (reading and writing) figured into the trajectories of my participants as they transitioned from religious to secular lives by drawing on texts participants wrote across extended spans of time, in one case over four years (Chapter 3), and in another, over nearly a decade (Chapter 4). In tracing the focal cases, I also showcase how literate activity around writing functions as a mode of the development of psychological functions across the lifespan (Valsiner & Connelly, 2003) and how these functions might contribute to overall senses of personhood.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Ware, Ryan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Prior, Paul A
• Russell, Lindsay R
• Koven, Michele
• Roozen, Kevin

• dialogic semiotics
• becoming
• qualitative research methods
• writing
• literate activity

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Ryan Ware

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/116061

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F116061