Towards an Ethics of Answerability: Reconsidering Dialogism in Sociocultural Literacy Research

This essay responds to the problem that sociocultural literacy research has failed to adequately theorize individual literacy learners as moral agents with the capacity to produce harm or good to themselves and others. Building from the rhetorical construct of dialogism, this inquiry explores how the early ethical thought of Mikhail Bakhtin can contribute an “ethics of answerability” to sociocultural literacy studies.