ABSTRACT
In this chapter we consider how post-structuralist troublings of traditional educational research orthodoxies might raise important questions about the way literacy and media literacy curricula are conceived and enacted. Focusing particularly on the performative (after Butler, 1990) dimension of young people's literacy practices, which are very often absent from discussions of literacy pedagogy, we illustrate, through an analysis of young men's participation in online technologies, how central the performance of identity is to the dynamic of a literacy event and make the case that pedagogy needs to take account of literacies as ‘ways of being with others.’ Such an emphasis demands a reconfiguration of literacy curricula to reposition teachers and young people as co-investigators of the dynamic and rituals (Marsh, 2004) of being with others and enables/facilitates the exploration and problematization of the boundaries between the different modalities within which performances of self are played out and/or given. By drawing attention to the rituals (Marsh, 2004; and see Marsh, this volume) of young people's cultural practices this kind of praxis may mobilize more nuanced understandings of the sense of displacement young people experience as they transgress heavily insulated (Bernstein, 1996) domain boundaries— for example, between their lifeworld experiences and schooled experience.
