Literacy Sponsorship, GenAI, and the Entangled Economies of Experiential Learning

Abstract

Deborah Brandt’s concept of literacy sponsorship remains foundational in writing studies but, as Brandt herself noted in 2015, its sharper insights into power, ideology, and asymmetry have often been softened in application. Building on this framework, Kara Poe Alexander has shown how reciprocal forms of sponsorship emerge in service-learning contexts where students act as both recipients and providers of literacy support. Inspired by this expanded model, this symposium essay returns to the original concept of sponsorship not to dispute its fundamentals but to continue extending it toward a more networked, mutual vision that better reflects the conditions of AI-mediated, experiential learning. Drawing on my own institutional example, this essay traces how literacy sponsorship moves bidirectionally across instructional, technological, and community spaces. It invites further dialogue about the future of literacy sponsorship in an age of distributed expertise and asks how our field might adapt its theories to better account for the tangled, mutual economies of literacy unfolding around us.