Amir Kalan

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) at McGill University. My work aims to create a sociology of literacy that provides insights into cultural, political, and power-relational dimensions of linguistic and textual practices. I mobilize discourse analysis, ethnography, practitioner research, narrative inquiry, and arts-based inquiry to study the sociological dimensions of reading, writing, and language education. I am particularly interested in learning about the experiences of minoritized and racialized students in multicultural and multilingual contexts. I study organic writing practices that occur beyond the current narrow institutional categorizations of writing styles, genres, and rhetorical norms. I seek to learn from literacy practices that are unofficial, underground, community-based, plurilingual, and multi-semiotic. I also welcome opportunities to study non-Western forms of language and literacy education. My research is often interdisciplinary. In my scholarship, I draw on philosophy, sociology, history, and literary theory. Where applicable, I make use of creative academic genres such as poetic scholarship.