Healthy Literacies: Old and New Literacy Hygienes

Abstract

This chapter concerns how literacy and health have been mutually co-constitutive, creating health-literacy assemblages, over time and place. The fields of health and education have different disciplinary knowledge bases, histories, and practices; health-literacy assemblages work across these discourse communities and institutions, and as such are examples of ‘heterogeneous engineering’ (Law, 2012, p. 107). Two major kinds of assemblage are identified in the chapter and traced across times and spaces: the medical health/literacy complex and the psychotherapeutic health/literacy complex. While each complex proposes that literacy practices be integrated into programs for producing healthy children, each is based on a different construct of literacy with material consequences for what, who, how, and why particular literacies are promoted. One key difference is in the importance accorded to the text as an actor and to the reader-text relation. Historical and contemporary cases are discussed, including clinic-based early reading promotion, language nutrition programs, bibliotherapy, and online parent advice resources.