Literacy and the Politics of Representation

<p>Literacy is a key indicator for comparing individuals and nations in contemporary society. It is central to public debates about the nature of the public sphere economic markets citizenship and self-governance. </p><p><em>Literacy and the Politics of Representation</em> aims to uncover the constructed nature of public understandings of literacy by examining detailed examples of how literacy is represented in a range of public contexts. It looks at the ways in which knowledge about literacy is created and distributed the location and relative power of the knowledge-makers and examines the different semiotic resources used in such representations: images and metaphors numerical and statistical models and textual narratives and how they are related to one another. </p><p>The book focuses on the UK from 1970 to the present but includes a range of international comparisons and examples. In addition exemplar chapters offer a model of analysis that can be used to deconstruct the representations of social policy issues. </p><p>This book is vital reading for postgraduate students in the areas of education studies literacy discourse analysis and multimodality.</p>