Contemporary nonprofit and governmental organizations actively mediate relationships through and compose representations of literacy initiatives and their participants’ literate abilities for multiple national and transnational audiences. Connecting Deborah Brandt’s theory of literacy sponsorship and New Literacy Studies scholars’ conceptions of literacy mediation to Bourdieu’s idea of the cultural intermediary, this article identifies critical processes of literacy intermediation during a 2008 “Voices of Women” national quilt project collaboration between nonprofit organization Create Africa South, the South African Parliamentary Millennium Programme, and women project participants. Intermediating relationships and processes intensify at postcolonial and multilingual sites of literacy initiatives, in particular through acts of framing and translating that literacy intermediaries engage. Identifying literacy intermediaries affords literacy studies scholars a critical tool to connect local sites of literacy to transnational organizational processes and policies.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric