‘Research mobilities in primary literacy education in England’ is an ESRC (UK) funded project, which investigates the movements of literacy research to and among primary school teachers in England against a shifting and politically charged context for literacy education. The project draws on a sociomaterial perspective that is seeing discourses as combination of non-human and human actors in various entangled spaces. These discourses are investigated through interdisciplinary approaches. Our first step was to create two corpora: a corpus from UK newspaper media (2017-2021) considering this as a proxy for public discourse that lets us investigate the topics in primary literacy education research that resonate with newspapers and their audiences. We tease out what institutions and people are regularly figured as sources of expertise or perhaps viewed negatively in society. Contrasting with this in some ways is our unique Twitter corpus which enables us to investigate the discourses around primary literacy education engaged in by teachers, researchers and research brokers, as mediated by this platform. We deploy our analysis to investigate how and why some kinds of literacy research are gaining traction while others are not, and who (and what) are social actors of significance in primary literacy education research as it is mobilised. Finally, we introduce a novel methodology in our project, as work-in-progress: the creation of sociomaterial tracings case studies using controversy mapping and network ethnography.
