Literacies Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives

«A collection of essays that brilliantly traces the thinking and writing of Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, two scholars known widely for their ability to immerse themselves in the social and cultural literacies that underpin much of what we know about contemporary teaching and learning with new communications technologies. Each essay, contextualized in what the authors term the 'text's biography', illustrates how changes over a period of twenty-five years in personal circumstances, space and place, and collegial influence, can lead to valuable grounded knowledge. Lankshear and Knobel's intuitions are riveting and of the kind that foreshadow where the field of literacy studies is headed.» (Donna E. Alvermann, University of Georgia)
«These essays represent the historical trek from the invention of the new literacy studies (the study of literacy in its social and cultural contexts) to the invention of the new literacies studies (the study of the social and cultural emergence of new digital literacies) by people who did not walk the path but helped to make it. If all other books were lost, we could begin to reconstruct the whole field from this book alone.» (James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University)