1. Objectives I consider how collaborative conceptual understandings of literacy can be built within communities in ways that reflexively consider epistemological difference. This is not so much a ‘how to’ as a reflection, from a Bourdieusian perspective, on what it was to develop a lens that was shared, and to conduct literacy and language research in ways that recognized diversity. I discuss ways in which literacy and language practices in communities can be re-conceptualized. through the process of working out what literacy is collaboratively, drawing on situated, everyday and community knowledge. 2. Methodology I was helped in this endeavour by the methodological insights from Lassiter and Campbell and their work on collaborative ethnography (Campbell and Lassiter 2010, Campbell and Lassiter 2015). This situated the enquiry into a more reciprocal and distributed model of research in which community researchers developed and framed the studies. While collaborative ethnography provided a pathway for this thinking, I also drew on ways of knowing from artistic modes of knowledge production (Coessens, Crispin and Douglas 2009, Barrett and Bolt 2007). 3. Findings The literacy as a concept moved from more formalized patterns to threads that could be seen spreading out all over the place and re-forming in new ways. Rather than fixing the nature of literacy within communities, re-thinking literacy ontologies became a focus for the studies. This then led to a layered and complex account of reflexivity, as my own situated understandings were entwined with those of the participants in my study as well as research collaborators. This then produced an account of literacy that is about the verve, voice and power of written texts. Literacy looks different wherever you look in the data. These competing analyses were also collaboratively constructed and reflexively analysed. The literacies were lived and experienced with people, and the construction of the data was produced in experience and within sites and space. This was not a model of research that took data ‘from’ a site but instead, produced it within a site, as a co-production

Campbell, E. and Lassiter L.E. (2010) From Collaborative Ethnography to Collaborative Pedagogy: Reflections on the Other Side of Middletown Project and Community-University Research Partnerships. Anthropology and Education Quarterly. 41(4): 370-385. Campbell, E. & Lassiter, L. E. (2015). Doing Ethnography Today: Theories, Methods, Exercises. Wiley-Blackwell. Coessens, K., Crispin, D. and Douglas, A. (2009) The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto. Ghent: The Orpheus Institute Barrett, E., and Bolt B. (2007) Practice as Research. Chippenham: UK I.B. Tauris and Co.