Evan Watkins

Literacy Work in the Reign of Human Capital by Evan Watkins is a discussion centered largely around the ideas of various literacies, their relation to attention and attention flow, and how these combine in today's "just-in-time" form of human capital.

Watkins addresses foundational literature in the area of literacy studies as well as current arguments and debates, walking a fine line between academic and popular writing style. For the most part he succeeds in making these ideas accessible to a lay reader, such as myself. That said, it still requires both an attention to detail and perhaps a second reading to get the most out of the book. I will readily admit I missed some key points my first time through and am looking forward to a better understanding the next time through. I present the last comment as a positive, a book outside my normal scope that can motivate a second reading has managed to be interesting and well-written at the same time.

This is a valuable work for those in both education (educators in general as well as those in cultural or literacy studies) and business. The better we understand what we are really doing and how we have tried doing it, the better we can consciously and systematically teach or utilize those resources.

Reviewed from an ARC made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (más)

Although it may “seem very abstract and specialized,” focusing “on English departments as organized workplaces rather than on English as a discipline of study, on work time rather than on work practices, on the circulation of a student population rather than on the values and knowledges at stake in the determination of work practices,” gives a fuller picture the English department as a site of “cultural production” that “is generally done with cheaply available material means, and there is often no very clearly marked division between who does the work and who actually owns the material means.” English is “an organized site of cultural production…whose design does not have to facilitate rapid and expansive circulation, whose products in fact do not necessarily circulate very far….What English produces is, precisely, a labor process, which is then available to function in the social circulation of people as one basis for the distribution and certification of human capital through the terms of evaluation.”… (más)