ABSTRACT
The Uses of Media Literacy responds to this conundrum, as it takes on the ambivalent and fraught nature of the original book. It explores media literacies through engaging social actors as researchers of their lived experience in a way that echoes Richard Hoggart and thereby respects what he brought to this activity. To read Hoggart is to read him slant, out of the corners of one’s eye. Through this, one can come to the ‘structure of feeling’ of Williams’ scholarship, as enacted by Hoggart. In the world of literacy studies, the book has sat uneasily within a canon that is primarily influenced by ethnographic and socio-linguistic understandings of literacy. The world of Hoggart is a painful one – Hoggart carried his complex burdens uneasily and did not provide us with any easy resting point.
