The literature on literacy and change has tended to focus on the ‘benefits’ of literacy, and the barriers faced by marginalized groups in accessing literacy education.   Moving beyond evaluation of inclusion strategies, this conference theme will look at literacy as a process for challenging and transforming inequalities - around, gender, poverty, language, ethnicity and disability. It provides the opportunity to investigate how literacy practices can sustain or challenge dominant power relationships in a wide range of contexts and from differing perspectives, and the significance of changing literacy environments and practices. This might include investigation of the processes through which adult literacy programmes challenge or reinforce dominant languages and literacies of power, or discussion of the potential for cross-cultural interaction within higher educational institutions to transform academic literacy practices and tackle current North-South inequalities in academic publishing. Exploring literacy processes in relation to socio-cultural and political change can raise new issues around research methodology, literacy pedagogy and planning approaches, such as: What insights can ethnographic research offer into changing literacies (both in terms of how literacies are changing and initiating change) and inequalities? How are new technologies shaping literacy practices both inside and outside educational programmes and what are the implications for social change? What role can literacy education (as compared to group mobilisation or ‘awareness raising’) play in transforming gender inequalities?

Key note speaker:

Prof. Suresh Canagarajah, William J and Catherine Craig Kirby Professor in Language Learning, Departments of Applied Linguistics and English, Pennsylvania State University: ‘The dilemmas of negotiating change in dominant literacy practices’.