Traversing Old and New Literacies (eBook)

Sue Nichols' literacy research is known for its boundary-crossing nature, traversing diverse contexts. Since the late 90s, she has been exploring literacy practices, texts, tools, discourses and identities across educational, community, familial, commercial and virtual sites. Using a toolkit of methods drawn from discourse analysis, semiotics, ecological perspectives and network theories, she has traced changing and continuing literacies. This work has raised critical questions about the social and political uses of literacies, which are now being pursued in the current volume. Sue currently holds the position of Associate Dean Research in the School of Education, University of South Australia. She has published several authored and edited books including Languages and Literacies as Mobile and Placed Resources (2017) and Learning Cities: Multimodal explorations and placed pedagogies (2018) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles, including in Literacy, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy and Changing English.

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This book re-examines the field of New Literacy Studies and promotes a shift away from binary constructions of literacies as 'old' or 'new' and to encourage critical reflection on the part of readers as to the uses of these constructs. First, the book examines the entanglement of pasts, presents and futures in contemporary literacy practices. Second, it considers representations of literacies as actors, having their own power and consequences. Third, it critically examines the place of 'new' and 'old' literacies in a marketplace in which social, economic and political power advantage is contested. The book demonstrates the use of assemblage theory drawing on semiotics, geo-semiotics and Actor Network Theory for analyzing literacies as assemblages. It provides readers with tools of analysis with which to interrogate claims made for the value of literacy, innovations and traditions alike. It also discusses implications for literacy policy, curriculum, teacher education and research.