Academic literacies

This chapter charts the development of Academic Literacies as a field of inquiry, outlining its particular epistemology, methodology, and orientation to academic writing (and to a lesser extent, reading). The chapter documents foundational work in Academic Literacies, the sociohistorical contexts from which it emerged, and developments over the past 30 years, exploring key themes including the opacity of academic conventions as well as their historically situated, contested(able) nature, and the relationship between writing, identity, and power. It explores the ethnographic methodological orientation of Academic Literacies research, commensurate with a social practices orientation towards reading and writing as inseparable from context. This is followed by a discussion of how Ac Lits-informed ‘critique’ can be linked to transformative pedagogic practice in academic contexts. The chapter discusses specific ways in which Academic Literacies challenges and intersects with the field of EAP. It tracks connections with traditions within EAP that adopt an explicitly critical orientation towards linguistic and semiotic practices in academia, centring on academic writing as an issue of rights and social justice, as involving multiple linguistic and semiotic resources and writer/text trajectories, as a spatially configured networked activity, and as a (de)colonial practice.