ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the use of written language has been represented and conceptualized among scholars located in a global context of asymmetrical relations across geographical regions, languages, and social, cultural, and historical contexts. The fashioning of literacy as social has been grounded in and propelled by situated, ethnographic studies of the use of written language that have emphasized the particularity of what people in concert do with each other, and what they are doing with and through written language. Fashioning literacy as social makes visible the cultural, economic, and political ideologies that legitimize particular uses and meanings of written language while marginalizing others. The English word ‘literacy’ translates problematically across languages. The schooling of literacy promulgates and naturalizes a hegemonic definition of literacy. The construct of literacy practices supplants the notion of an autonomous model of literacy with what Street has named ideological models of literacy.
