MACMILLAN Portraits of Everyday Literacy for Social Justice: Reframing the Debate for Families and Communities

Based on an ethnographic study involving three families who live on a Midlands council housing estate, this book presents portraits of everyday lives - and the literacy practices that are part of them - as a way to explore the complex relationship between literacy and social justice. Each portrait focuses on a different aspect of literacy in everyday life: drawing on perspectives offered by the long and diverse tradition of literacy studies, each is followed by discussion of a different way of looking at literacy and what this means for social justice. The lens of literacy allows us to see the challenges faced by many families and communities as a result of social policy, and how a narrow view of literacy is often implicated within these challenges. It also illustrates the ways in which literacy practices are powerful resources in the creative and collaborative navigation of everyday lives. Arguing for the importance of looking carefully at everyday literacy in order to understand the intertwining factors that threaten justice, this book positions literary research and education as central to the struggle for wider social change. It will be of interest and value to researchers, educators and students of literacy for social justice. Review “Utterly compelling, this book enlists us to contemplation, action, and tough realizations surrounding the intertwining of economics and literacy. Susan Jones eloquently reframes long-standing debates in ways sure to engage those who believe literacy to be a fundamental human right.” (Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University, USA) “This book, beautifully written and crafted, is an urgent call to researchers working at the cutting edge of literacy studies to listen to the lived experience of people who experience austerity. Literacy research that values the everyday is needed more than ever in order to address key issues of power, social justice and inequality. The book provides a clear account of everyday literacies of families living on a housing estate in the UK. This book exposes the mechanisms by which so many people have been blamed for policies not of their making, and creates a space where engaged literacy research takes centre stage to articulate and challenge these injustices. A riveting and powerfully articulated ‘must read’ for all literacy researchers that explores new paradigms for new times to move the field of literacy studies forward.” (Kate Pahl, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) “This is a timely and hugely engaging book; it is a rich ethnographic study with a central focus on the ways in which literacy and inequality are bound together… It is through the sharp lens of literacy, that the pages unpick the critical and Interconnected challenges it presents in relation to social justice. We enter a community that that has been marginalized in so many ways and where austerity is more than a political discourse - it is biting hard. Importantly, the critical discussion opens up to how we can work towards frameworks that offer resistance and challenge inequality in contemporary Britain and beyond.” (Vicky Duckworth, Edge Hill University, UK) About the Author Susan Jones is an Assistant Professor at the School of Education, University of Nottingham, UK.