Traversing Old and New Literacies

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.

Chapter 1: Assembling literacies: Beyond binaries.- Chapter 2: Where is the time? Temporality in literacy assemblages.- Chapter 3 Dividing ourselves from the past: The constitution of ‘old’ and ‘new’ literacies.- Chapter 4: The undead children’s book and the persistent ‘bedtime’ story.- Chapter 5: By virtue of association: The precarious and resilient library.- Chapter 6: A powerful ‘jumble’: Magazines assembling the world for children.- Chapter 7: Healthy literacies for children: Old and new literacy hygienes.- Chapter 8: Tools and times: Beyond the technology native/immigrant binary.- Chapter 9: Children telling their lifetimes: Temporality as a resource for meaning making.- Chapter 10: Cyborg assemblages, heritage literacies and agendas for literacy research.