Activist literacies: An analysis of the literacy practices of a school-based human rights club

In this article, I examine the literacy practices of a high school-based human rights club. I investigate how the group engages in certain kinds of textual production to sponsor and arrange advisory sessions (school-wide meetings between teachers and small groups of students). More specifically, I consider how the club adapts school genres to mediate advisory sessions and to advance its visions of human rights and international relations. I describe how students collaborate both to develop a strategy for negotiating the school bureaucracy and to produce texts that will elicit institutional action. Also, I present a discourse analysis of one student-authored text crucial to the mediation of advisory meetings. I argue that students’ knowledge of situations (e.g. advisory sessions) shapes how they adapt institutional genres and advance their visions of the world.

► The literacy practices of school-based activist groups have been under-researched. ► Activists adapt genres to build institutional sites in accordance with their beliefs. ► Activists circulate their visions of the world through generic forms. ► Knowledge of situations is a key determinant of activists’ discursive performances.