Producing Good Citizens: Literacy and Citizenship Training in Anxious Times
By examining a range of spaces where those hoping to acquire full citizenship may have encountered literacy, I investigate how citizenship and literacy have been mutually but often contradictorily implicated for often disenfranchised individuals. Literacy became a way to measure the potential productivity of industrial workers, many of them immigrants, during a period that established many of the legal and cultural requirements of U.S. citizenship in parallel with the proliferation of mass manufacturing. Additionally, this study reveals how workers and immigrants themselves position literacy as a tool for social and economic mobility in their quests for full citizenship.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign