This study analyzed the narrative meaning of adult illiterate learners’ life and experience from the perspective of
the cross-over of multi-steps of temporal life-course and various spatial moments in social areas. The author
focuses on the nature of segmentation in time and spaces that are intertwined in adult illiterates lives. The
life-course is not a homogeneous linear and seamless continuity, but rather the sum of segmented momentums
exposed in heterogeneously located spatial social realities. In this research, the author reveals how the segments
of life-pieces are colliding to shape dialogical interactions in one’s own personal learning history of literacy
journey. This research used oral life history that included 18 learners who enrolled in a literacy education
program in the City of Ulsan. This paper found out four meaningful categories or segments of life-space with
the following different four themes: (1) home, (2) marriage, (3) community, and (4) adult literacy education
space. First, home as a living space was a barren land that took the chance of learning away from them. It was
the place where their learning deprivation has begun, and thus the fate of being illiterate has been assigned
during their entire lives, as victims of prejudices as being women as well as being illiterate. Second, marriage
looks to provide new space for escaping from the given ‘first family space’. It, however, consequentially ends up
with a space where the problems and patterns of the previous home circumstances are continuously repeating.
Third, local communities or social citizenship areas are the space where the learners completely face the limit as
illiterate persons. As the modern social spaces are constructed with elaborated symbols and abstracts, the space
applies endless repression and discrimination to illiterate persons and make them conceal and disguise their
identities in return. it is the place where the learners embodied the demands of others and being “otherness.”
They are constantly judged as abnormal by the groups they belong. Finally, the adult literacy education is the
space of liberation. It is the learning space where the learners could feel free from the prejudices of ‘otherness’.
It provides shelter to relocate themselves from ‘being-others’, and transform to the new identity who are able to
construct new space of living, as another social birth.