ABSTRACT
Over the last decade, many studies in literacy and in new media in education have merged two key sets of theoretical resources: firstly, the Literacy Studies (or ‘New Literacy Studies’) orientation to the study of literacies as social practices that vary across sites and have an ideological or political dimension (Street, 1984) and, secondly, Multimodal Studies which show how literacy activities are inextricably linked with other modes of communication, visual, kinaesthetic and so on (Jewitt, 2008; Kress 2010). Explicitly brought together in Kress and Street (2006) and in Pahl and Rowsell (2006), these two resources have since commonly been drawn on together in literacy and new media studies on the basis that they complement each other. As Street (2012: 1) put it: ‘Multimodality and Literacy Studies, brought together, fill out a larger more nuanced picture of social positionings and communication by building an equal recognition of practices, texts, contexts, space, and time’.
