Review and Scholarly Syntheses as Anti-Racist Action

At the final session of the 2022 Literacy Research Association Conference, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Marcus Croom, Mary McVee, and Allison Skerrett presented critical work related to equity, representation, and race in literacy scholarship. Panelists shared concerns and pursued a shared goal. Specifically, as literacy scholars, they recognized that like the empirical research conducted in classrooms and communities, review scholarship--scholarship that aspires to make sense of large bodies of available research--is always subject to systemic biases, privileging, and racism. In this panel session, we intentionally sought to dismantle biases through four review-oriented projects that--each in its own way--attempts to counter the systemic whitewashing that has characterized review scholarship in literacy.