ABSTRACT
“Academic literacies” is a field of research and intellectual inquiry that has developed from the early 1990s onwards, with particularly strong roots in the UK and South Africa, and with evidence of increasing interest and take-up across a number of fields in the USA, Europe and parts of South America. In broad terms, it is a field that seeks to explore the nature of literacy practices of academia — and more widely formal schooling — and the consequences of such practices for individuals, institutions and knowledge making more generally. The field of academic literacies draws on foundational notions and insights from a number of interdisciplinary traditions, notably new literacy studies, critical discourse analysis and work in the sociology of knowledge.
