Power and Identity in a Community of Academic Literacy Practice

In the past two decades, ethnographic studies on literacy have become an important strand of literacy research (Baynham, 2004). Some of the earlier and most significant studies called for greater emphasis to be given to out-of-school literacies (e.g. Scribner and Cole, 1981; Heath, 1983), while others focused on social literacies (e.g. ulick and Stroud, 1993; Street, 1995). However, there are now calls for new directions in the research on literacy to bring the study of literacy back to pedagogy (Baynham, 2004; Rodgers, 2004) and its material consequences (Luke, 2004) within the postmodern context of multilingualism and multimodal communicative practices (Street, 2004).