Reading as a socio-cultural endeavour: a case of Arab women’s practices in an intellectual and cultural salon

While most research on reading in the Arab world and diaspora has focused on Arabic diglossia – specifically the divide between Standard Arabic (FusHa) and Dialectal Arabic (A’amiya) – few studies have examined reading as a socio-cultural endeavour. This study addresses that gap by investigating the collective literacy practices of educated, multilingual Arab women within a diasporic intellectual and cultural salon. Framed by Bourdieu’s (Citation1986, Citation2011) theory of capital and using qualitative thematic analysis, the ethnographic case study explores how participants engaged in interactive read-alouds, dialogic reflection, and bilingual discussions to mobilise and sustain cultural, social, and linguistic capital. The salon functions as a dynamic socio-cultural space where literacy practices foster community, critical negotiation of meaning, and expressions of identity and agency. Through strategic language use and collaborative interpretation, participants rearticulated historical traditions of communal reading, positioning themselves as active agents in sustaining intellectual and cultural heritage across transnational contexts. By demonstrating how negotiations of linguistic capital unfold in an intellectual space – where participants shift between Arabic and English, assigning context-specific value to each language – this study advances understanding of multilingual literacy in Arab diasporic contexts as a collective, relational, and capital-building practice of knowledge production and social empowerment beyond formal education.