Copy the page URI to the clipboard
Goodfellow, Robin
(2013).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203074510-6
Abstract
Literacy theorists have long argued for an understanding of the phenomenon as participation in social action (see Gourlay and Oliver, Lea, McKenna and Hughes, in this volume). Literacy in social settings implicates whole communities, ‘values and beliefs’ about knowledge, ‘identities, subject positions, and potential for agency’, as well as power relations which may constrain ‘possibilities for self-hood for particular participants’ (Ivanič et al. 2007: 706). Literacy research in higher education, which has conventionally focused on writing as the principal means of action, now addresses a landscape in which text-making involves multiple modes, and an increasingly complex interaction of social and technical phenomena (Kress 2003, 2010). There is a major challenge in trying to bring the perspectives of communities, power relations, individual subjects, and other actors to bear on the textual practices of the digital university. In this chapter I aim to take up this challenge in relation to the practices of scholarship.