Bird by Bird: Finding Human Connections in Digital Literacy

On April 10th, 2024, Professor Jennifer Rowsell delivered her Inaugural Lecture, titled "Bird by Bird: Finding Human Connections in Digital Literacy," highlighting her extensive research and scholarly career. 

What stood out from the lecture is her steady movement into expansive ways to think about reading, writing, listening, and speaking across generations of learners. Reflecting on over 20 funded research studies and academic posts at American, Canadian, and UK universities, Rowsell gave the audience a diverse picture of new approaches to literacy research that moved from children and their digital play, media use, and multimodal reading habits to teenagers’ social media use, productions and design work to adult learners’ lived digital habits. Theoretical and ethnographically oriented, 

Rowsell’s research asks important contemporary questions about ways to bridge a gap between digital practices in everyday life contrasted with the (more traditional and often anachronistic) forms of literacy/cies taught in school. 

Rowsell concluded her lecture with a close-up view of her latest book, The Comfort of Screens: Literacy in Postdigital Times (CUP) and provoked the audience to contemplate ways that we can humanise our relationships with screens.