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Campano's Chapter Summary

Decent Essays

In Campano’s chapter one, we are introduced to the community literacies project, an ethnographic and participatory action research initiative at St. Thomas Aquinas Parish. This local parish supports a community rich with multicultural perspectives, and multilingual traditions. As the name implies, one of the major goals of this project was to investigate the various forms of literacies available throughout this diverse community and explore the opportunities they provide to respond to their absence of power in their various positions of precarity as a result of immigrant or socioeconomic status (Banki, 2013). The chapter opens by emphasizing a strength based perspective as opposed to the dangerous deficit mindset, that is often heard in discussion of minority populations. This asset-based mindset is vital to both this type of research undertaking as well as engaging community …show more content…

The 6 discourse communities that were discussed in this book included: religious, educational, activist, legal, service and cultural discourse. As described in the chapter each individual each communities has various forms of social capital and valuable knowledge as well as it’s limitations, no one discourse community can provide members of the parish with all the resources it needs, and if one should dissipate their would be a gap in resources in services that it would be difficult if not impossible for the others to replace. The success of these communities lies in their ability to both function as individual entities as well as synergistically in what Campano refers to as a cosmopolitan counterpublic, that capitalizes on each individuals varied tapestry of experiences and values the cultural exchange of various

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