Gee, J. “The New Literacy Studies and the 'Social Turn'”

Here Gee discusses the idea of the 'social turn' and how it is central to NLS. The social turn in a turn away from looking at individuals outside of their social contexts, toward looking at systemic dynamics I might say. He says that NLS see “reading and writing only make sense when studied in the context of social and cultural.” He then makes a list of 13 related movements, a GREAT place for tons of references.

After that list, Gee discusses how the social turn was a way to react against the individualistic tendencies of capitalism, but then goes on to say how that was the old capitalism, and the new capitalism actually benefits from the social turn. Oh shit! I'm not entirely sure I get it. The new capitalism needs workers to work together, not as individuals like in the industrialized world.
They forms systems that are bigger than the individual but all serve the company; people themselves become replaceable and the knowledge formed as a construction stays with the company should any individual leave. Again, I don't know if I quite got it right. But it's scary.

Gee suggests that the social turn may have gone too far, as with the tendencies of postmodernism, away from the individual, to ignore him or her in favor of the importance of the social factors at work. He reminds us that just as context makes words make sense, so words create context; they endlessly mirror one another. The social turn was important in bringing the social context to the fore, but it may have left the person too far behind, for just as there is no individual without a social context, there is of course no social context without individuals.

He also make the point that meaning is the product of “work” on both ends; in other words, to get people to recognize your act/word as meaningful takes work, and the act of recognizing others' actions/words as having meaning takes work. Not sure I get this yet either. Also, he says that it takes work to sustain these meanings. This seems important because we are so entrenched in our systems of meaning that we can think of them as stable and “real” not as constructed and fluid-- needing to be maintained.

There's another part to the piece about the differences in thinking between a university researcher and a K-12 teacher: the former viewing things more socially, the latter more individualistically; but I'm not sure how it all fits in, so I'll save myself from recapping in a wrong-type fashion.