Dissertation Summary   O'Rourke, Bridget Kathleen Meanings and Practices of Literacy in Urban Settlement Communities: Chicago's Hull House 1890-1940 School: PURDUE UNIVERSITY (0183) Degree: PHD Date: 1998 pp: 170 Advisor: HARKIN, PATRICIA. Source: DAI-A 59/12, p. 4420, Jun 1999 Subject: LANGUAGE, RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION (0681); WOMEN'S STUDIES (0453); EDUCATION, HISTORY OF (0520) ISBN: 0-599-13158-6 UMI Number: AAT 9914531 Abstract: This dissertation analyzes oral and written literacy narratives of immigrant and working- class men and women who resided in the neighborhood served by Chicago's Hull House settlement during the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century. Narrative analysis of individual stories about the meanings and uses of English literacy within families and communities is intertwined with an investigation of Hull House as an institutional context for literacy development as well as large-scale economic and political conditions that impacted the settlement and the neighborhood. Together, these strands of inquiry contribute to better understanding of the ways in which literate practices were experienced by individuals and constructed by social and institutional relations and historical codes of class, ethnicity and gender.   return to dissertation list