Sally Thompson – författare

This book examines how people rely on social networks to manage day-to-day life in modern textually dense and technologically complex environments, focusing on the work of literacy mediators —people who help other people to read and write texts.Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a small rural Australian town, the author paints a portrait of literacy mediators as they engage in everyday relationships with neighbours, colleagues and service users. It suggests that literacy mediation has much in common with other forms of unpaid or poorly paid feminised care labour. It hides in plain sight because of the inability of dominant neoliberal education perspectives to value informal, affective and relationally led pedagogies. This book takes a sociocultural approach to literacy, suggesting that literacy is not a singular cognitive or psychological process, as standardised tests and curriculum would suggest, but rather a shared practice that emerges from, and is shaped by, the everyday demands of life and work.A major contribution to existing accounts of adult literacy, this book will be of interest to doctoral students, researchers, and scholars involved in the fields of literacy studies, critical language studies, and welfare studies.

Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World brings to life the complicated history of Jesuit missionaries among Montana’s Native peoples-a saga of encounter, accommodation, and resistance during the transformative decades of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Sally Thompson tells the story of how Jesuit values played out in the lives of the Bitterroot Salish people. The famous Black Robe (Jesuit) Father Pierre-Jean De Smet actually spent little time among his “beloved Flatheads.” Instead, he traveled extensively between the Pacific and the Rockies, mapping the pathways and noting the valuable resources. His popular writings helped spark the westward movement of white settlers.Thompson picks up the story of the Salish peoples and black-robed missionaries at a Potawatomi mission on the Missouri in 1839 and follows their intertwined experiences throughout the lifetime of Salish chief Charlo, who eventually cursed the day white immigrants came into his country. Chief Charlo attributed the missionaries’ disconnected beliefs and exploitative actions to their status as orphans rejected from their place of creation, as he had learned from the story of Eden. Despite Charlo’s valiant efforts to protect his homeland, the Salish endured a forced removal from their beloved Bitterroot Valley to the Flathead Reservation in 1891. Charlo died in 1910, just before the massive giveaway of more than half of the Salish’s treaty-guaranteed lands through implementation of the Allotment Act. Despite it all, his people endure.In this up-close account of the Bitterroot Salish people during the lifetime of Chief Charlo, Thompson examines the fundamental differences in the ways Euro-Americans and Native Americans related to land and nature.

Black Robes Enter Coyote’s World brings to life the complicated history of Jesuit missionaries among Montana’s Native peoples-a saga of encounter, accommodation, and resistance during the transformative decades of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Sally Thompson tells the story of how Jesuit values played out in the lives of the Bitterroot Salish people. The famous Black Robe (Jesuit) Father Pierre-Jean De Smet actually spent little time among his “beloved Flatheads.” Instead, he traveled extensively between the Pacific and the Rockies, mapping the pathways and noting the valuable resources. His popular writings helped spark the westward movement of white settlers.Thompson picks up the story of the Salish peoples and black-robed missionaries at a Potawatomi mission on the Missouri in 1839 and follows their intertwined experiences throughout the lifetime of Salish chief Charlo, who eventually cursed the day white immigrants came into his country. Chief Charlo attributed the missionaries’ disconnected beliefs and exploitative actions to their status as orphans rejected from their place of creation, as he had learned from the story of Eden. Despite Charlo’s valiant efforts to protect his homeland, the Salish endured a forced removal from their beloved Bitterroot Valley to the Flathead Reservation in 1891. Charlo died in 1910, just before the massive giveaway of more than half of the Salish’s treaty-guaranteed lands through implementation of the Allotment Act. Despite it all, his people endure.In this up-close account of the Bitterroot Salish people during the lifetime of Chief Charlo, Thompson examines the fundamental differences in the ways Euro-Americans and Native Americans related to land and nature.