Lucia Thesen – författare

This book is an analysis of student literacy in an academic setting, and how this has changed due to political, economic and social factors. The contributors, who are all engaged in academic literacy work at a South African university, use the theoretical tradition of New Literacy Studies as developed by theorists such as James Gee, Brian Street and Gnnther Kress, and apply this to a case study of one university in the changing context of South Africa.

Academic Literacy and the Languages of Change will be of interest to postgraduates and academics researching sociolinguistics, or language and education.

This book seeks to disrupt the narrative about the process of academic writing and the written products which are currently valued in the university by juxtaposing the messiness and deletions of the writing process with the hegemonic imaginary of what research writing should look like. The author uses writing as both a subject and a method of enquiry in an ethnographic deep dive into her long-term engagement with a postgraduate writers'' circle in an elite South African university. The book engages with growing global interest in the geopolitics of research writing and its relationship to patterns of epistemic privilege, drawing on current work on decolonising knowledge production. It opens a space to widen and deepen how we imagine the relationship between writing and knowledge-making.