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The Social Uses of Literacy: Theory and Practice in Contemporary South Africa challenges state-driven policy and provision in South Africa around the construction of a national delivery system for adult literacy that is part of a programme for Adult Basic Education. The implication is that many people who are the target of this system will be unwilling to participate at the entry point of literacy acquisition unless a reconceptualisation of the nature of literacy use by adults is made. Using fascinating and carefully documented case-study material, this book raises vital questions about literacy and illiteracy, and about adult education. Above all, it questions the efficacy of any literacy programme which fails to acknowledge the many ways in which uneducated and so called 'illiterate' people already use reading, writing and numeracy in their everyday lives.
Social Literacies develops new and critical approaches to the understanding of literacy in an international perspective. It represents part of the current trend towards a broader consideration of literacy as social practices, and as its title suggests, it focuses on the social nature of reading and writing and the multiple character of literacy practices.
The idea behind this book is that in complex societies like our own there are different worlds of literacy that exist side by side. This book presents a range of case studies describing some of these worlds of literacy and is carefully organised by theme, so as to bring out both the differences and connections between them.
Revisiting Richard Hoggart’s classic work The Uses of Literacy (1957), this book applies Hoggart’s framework to media literacy today, examining media literacy’s various uses, the tensions between them and what this means for people, communities and the contemporary configurations of social class. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart wrote about how his working class community, in the North of England, were at once using the new ‘mass literacy’ for self-improvement, education, social mobility and civic engagement and, at the same time, the powerful were seizing the opportunity also to use this expansion in literacy, through the new popular culture, for commercial and political ends. Working in the intersection between education, cultural studies and literacies, the authors write about media literacy as a contested, under-theorised field through Hoggart’s ‘line of sight’ to provide a perspective on media literacy and working class culture today. This reimagining of a classic work, piercingly relevant to studies of class in Britain in 2019, will be of key interest to scholars in Media Studies, as well as interested readers in Communication Studies, Literacy Studies, Cultural Studies, Politics and Sociology.
Traces of a Stream offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas. In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well. Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.
This volume demonstrates how literacy is more than learning to read and write. Literacy creates communities, organizes personal and social lives, makes possible civil society and the rule of law, and underwrites the commitment of both modern and developing societies to universal education and ever higher levels of literate competence. Everything that is involved in being and becoming literate is the concern of this interdisciplinary group of distinguished scholars.
At the heart of this book lies a reappraisal of humanities research and its use in understanding the conditions of a consumer-led society. This is an open, investigative, critical, scientific task as well as an opportunity to engage with creative enterprise and culture. Now that every user is a publisher, consumption needs to be rethought as action not behavior, and media consumption as a mode of literacy. Online social networks and participatory media are often still ignored by professionals, denounced in the press and banned in schools. But the potential of digital literacy should not be underestimated. Fifty years after Richard Hoggart's pioneering The Uses of Literacy reshaped the educational response to popular culture, John Hartley extends Hoggart's argument into digital media. Media evolution has made possible the realism of the modern age journalism, the novel and science not to mention mass entertainment on a global scale. Hartley reassesses the historical and global context, commercial and cultural dynamics and the potential of popular productivity through analysis of the use of digital media in various domains, including creative industries, digital storytelling, YouTube, journalism, and mediated fashion. Encouraging mass participation in the evolutionary growth of knowledge, The Uses of Digital Literacy shows how today's teenage fad may become tomorrow's scientific method. Hartley claims the time has come for education to catch up with entertainment and for the professionals to learn from popular culture. This book will stimulate the imagination and stir further research.
Using literacy practices in the newly independent post-apartheid Namibia as a lens through which to examine the effects of globalisation, this broad case study looks at issues surrounding tourism, state control and the new forces of consumerism. By placing literacy at the centre of an investigation into social and cultural change as experienced by individuals, Papen shows that in times of change, reading and writing are always implicated in structures of power and inequality. The book considers language practices that can exclude some members of Namibian society and also looks at the strategies used by local people to accommodate and even embrace the onward march of global English and the influx of foreign visitors, practices and modes of commerce and interaction.
The rise of New Literacy Studies and the shift from studying reading and writing as a technical process to examining situated literacies—what people do with literacy in particular social situations—has focused attention toward understanding the connections between reading and writing practices and the broader social goals and cultural practices these literacy practices help to shape. This collection brings together situated research studies of literacy across a range of specific contexts, covering everyday, educational, and workplace domains. Its contribution is to provide, through an empirical framework, a larger cumulative understanding of literacy across diverse contexts.