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This article explores the implications of a mobilities perspective for the conceptualization, teaching, and study of academic literacies. Mobility has come to serve as a catalyst for rethinking scholarly work in a variety of fields--most provocatively, the assumed stability as well as uniformity of what is studied and the location and products of acts and actors of study. The concept of academic literacies aligns with a mobilities perspective in its challenge to a still-dominant conception of "literacy" as singular, universal, uniform, and stable. However, in recognition that any attempt to define mobility, academic literacies, or "mobility and academic literacies" may itself be antithetical to the inherent mobility of all concepts, including "mobility" and "academic literacies," this exploration takes the form of an epistolary conversation whose movement--its turns, eddies, currents--may illustrate both the potential directions and navigational challenges of taking a mobilities perspective on academic literacies.

Conspiracy theories are often disqualified as inadequate and deliberate forms of misinformation. In this analysis, we engage with a specific case, the conspiracy theory developed on an online New Right forum called Q about the so-called "MAGA Kid incident" with focus on its circulation and uptake on Facebook. Drawing on ethnomethodological principles, the analysis shows how ergoic argumentation is systematically being deployed as a means of debunking rational-factual discourses about such incidents. While rationality itself is being rejected, conspiracy theorists deploy "reasonable" knowledge tactics. The paper shows how conspiracy theorists skillfully mobilize social media affordances, particularly Internet memes, to promote conspiracism as a form of inclusive political activism as well as a legitimate and "critical" mode of reasoning.

The papers in this volume all articulate a keen awareness of the shift in sociolinguistic economies caused by online technologies. We now live in an online-offline nexus of communication, and realizing this invites changes in the ways in which we traditionally view and imagine the foundations of our disciplinary approaches. In reviewing the papers, I focus on two important aspects of such revisionist enterprises. One is the emergence of an analytical triad of infrastructures, actions and moralizations, evidence of which is offered in the different papers. The second aspect is of a more general nature: we can suggest, on the basis of the evidence presented in this volume, to reverse the general heuristic of research from groups-individuals-language towards interaction-individuals-groups. This reversal of direction would equip our disciplines with an extraordinarily powerful theory of social action.

The hashtag #justsaying is one of Twitter's global stock hashtags. The hashtag is nontopical and appears to fulfil a complex range of metapragmatic framing functions. In this paper, I shall look at Dutch-language tweets in which the hashtag is being used as a fully enregistered 'translingual' framing device, and I will attempt an analysis focused on the specific kinds of communicative actions it marks and organises. I shall use the notion of formatting as the point of departure: hashtags, as part of an innovative online scripted register, can be seen as formatting devices that introduce, proleptically, a recognisable framing effect on the statement (the tweet), often as a reframing response to other statements giving keys for complex and multiple but equally formatted forms of uptake. The hashtag, thus, appears to have powerful interactional structuring effects in formatting specific lines of action.

Saussurean and Chomskyan "conduit" views of meaning in communication, dominant in much of expert and lay linguistic semantics, presuppose a simple, closed and linear system in which outcomes can be predicted and explained in terms of finite sets of rules. Summarizing critical traditions of scholarship, notably those driven by Bateson's view of systems infused with more recent linguistic-anthropological insights into the ideologically mediated and indexically organized "total linguistic fact," this paper argues for a view of meaning in terms of complex open systems in which complex units of analysis invite more precise distinctions within "meaning." Using online viral memes and the metapragmatic qualifier of "cool" as cases in point, we see that the meaning of such memes is better described as a range of "effects," most of them nonlinear and not predictable on the basis of the features of the sign itself. Such effects suggest a revised and broader notion of nonlinear "perlocution."

This essay describes the process of Hymesian monitoring, a collaborative effort to understand voice in education, so crucial in Hymes's later work. A report of ethnographic monitoring in 1970s Philadelphia and a recent collaborative project in the Caribbean demonstrate how one can work from the voice of the pupil, through that of the analyst toward that of the teacher and back, checking what each party brought into the analysis and treating each of these voices as legitimate.

Reflecting on the contributions in this volume, this paper engages with the development of widespread concepts of literacy, and gradually moves towards a view in which different literacy systems are seen, and have to be seen, as relatively autonomous. The papers in this volume engage with such a relatively autonomous system, that of grassroots literacy. And when we consider this system in relation to others in the context of an increasingly globalizing world, we notice that grassroots literacy represents the "small print" of literacy-in-the-world.

This paper describes the cultural semantics of internet courses in American accent. Such courses are offered by corporate providers to specific groups of customers: people in search of success in the globalized business environment. The core of such courses is an order of indexicality which stresses uniformity and homogeneity, producing an invisible accent that replaces existing "foreign" (i.e. authentic, biographic) accents. It is a new form of commodified dialectology, which differs quite substantially from common state and academic attitudes towards dialects and accents. The procedures used by such private providers are instances of language policing aimed at the infinitely small stuff of language: pronunciation. They show the interplay of different institutional actors in producing language norms within a globalized environment, and they raise issues of subjectivity and agency.

This paper draws on the recently theorised notions of space and scale in sociolinguistics to investigate the complexity and micro-variation of the Chinese language in the context of mass internal migration, and the way in which sociolinguistic processes shed light on the construction of migrant identities. In spite of the enormously rich diversity in Chinese languages, images of linguistic stability and homogeneity overlie the societal diversity that characterises every real social environment. The monoglot ideologies focused on Putonghua often present obstacles for migrant workers whose Putonghua proficiency is limited, and disqualify their existing language resources and skills. Three vignettes will illustrate this. The first one demonstrates the presence and influence of Putonghua in an eastern coastal city through a story told by a migrant child; the second vignette reveals how a migrant worker's regional accent is misrecognised in the interactions with the locals; and the third vignette illustrates how a migrant worker is polyglot in one language and how this polyglot repertoire is organised indexically in relation to layered and stratified spaces. Therefore the monoglot ideologies often disqualify some people's linguistic resources; many migrant workers nevertheless develop a polyglot repertoire and navigate such obstacles.