Vuyo Jamieson's Preliminary Exam

This dissertation examines how youth-led literacy practices shape South African youths’ experiences of meaning-making, participation, and agency within and across school library spaces. Situated in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, the study responds to dominant deficit-based narratives that frame youth literacy primarily through crisis, failure, and remediation. Rather than treating literacy as a technical skill or measuring reading proficiency, this study conceptualizes literacy as a sociocultural, relational, and justice-oriented practice shaped by language, identity, resources, power, and institutional conditions. Guided by Calabrese Barton and Tan’s framework of Rightful Presence, the study investigates how young people move beyond conditional inclusion by making meaning, exercising agency, and reshaping literacy spaces through their participation. The research focuses on a cohort of sixteen learners from Andrew Moyake School of Excellence in Makhanda, Eastern Cape, who began participating in a student-organized book club in Grade 8 and, over time, contributed to the development of a student-led school library. The study also attends to the cross-site literacy partnership between Andrew Moyake School of Excellence and St Andrew’s College, two interconnected school contexts marked by unequal histories, resources, and institutional infrastructures. Using a qualitative, community-engaged, retrospective longitudinal case study design, the dissertation draws on individual interviews, a focus group discussion, documentary materials, youth-generated artifacts, participant-guided virtual walk-throughs, photo elicitation, and limited observation of literacy activities. These data sources will be analyzed thematically using Rightful Presence as a sensitizing framework, with attention to structure, culture, resources, practice, meaning-making, participation, agency, and bids for Rightful Presence.

The study contributes to literacy scholarship, library and information science, and equityoriented educational research by reframing South African youth not as passive recipients of literacy intervention, but as knowledgeable actors who shape literacy environments, claim dignity, and participate in the reorganization of school library spaces. By centering youth-led literacy practices in a structurally unequal context, this dissertation offers a dignity-centered account of literacy as a practice of agency, participation, and possibility.

Zoom link info:
Meeting ID: 817 9347 0372
Password: 2026

Questions? Contact Vuyokazi Jamieson.