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Literacy Potentials: Agency, Embodiment, And Hybridity In Cesar Chavez's Discourse Practices, Clayton Walker

Wayne State University Dissertations

This project examines César Chávez's writing during his work in the Community Service Organization in the 1950s to understand hybrid literacies and agency as an embodied aspect of literacy. Using a theoretical framework grounded in embodied cognition, this dissertation develops the concept of discursive readiness potential to describe agency as a capacity to act in discursive situations that emerges from one's embodied practice of literacies. The project explores Chávez's discourse genealogy through the first thirty-five years of his life in order to define lifeworld Discourse as an emergent hybridity that accounts for one's capacity to act based on one's history …