ABSTRACT
Literacy, as Rockhill puts it so succinctly, has been constructed as power in discourses of power (Rockhill 1993). The Freirean vision of disempowerment in particular has been critiqued for its unidimensional model of social power, and by its tendency to conflate women’s realities into one oppressive experience (see Mohanty 1991; hooks 1993; Moser 1993; Stromquist 1997). Ethnographic approaches to literacy and communication, as evidenced by the other chapters in this book, have become almost ideological movements in themselves, embedded within modern emphases on diversity and the politics of difference.
