‘Academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia

Abstract

In this paper, I briefly track the emergence and foci of academic literacies as a field of inquiry, summarising its contributions to understandings about writing and meaning making in academia. Writing from my specific geohistorical location in the UK, I foreground the importance of early key works that encapsulated concerns about deficit orientations to students’ language and literacy practices (e.g. Ivanič, 1998; Lea and Street,1998). I also underline the transnational dimension to the development of academic literacies which has helped drive forward intellectual debates about the relationship between academic language and literacy practices, and participation in academia. I argue that academic literacies provides an important space for critically exploring what are often taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature and value of academic writing conventions, and the ways these (both assumptions and conventions) impact on opportunities for participation in knowledge making. This critical thinking space continues to serve as an intellectual resource for researchers, teachers and students in contemporary neo-liberal higher education, where regimes of evaluation are super-normative, even in (or because of) a context of super-diversity, that is increased mobility of peoples and semiotic practices. Academic literacies as praxis necessarily involves straddling both normative and transformative orientations (Lillis and Scott, 2007) or what Hall (1992) refers to as the ‘academic’ and ‘intellectual’ dimensions to academia.

“You become academic royalty once you’ve published”: A social practice exploration of identity in academic writing

“…Their argument fails to recognise that writers like their study participants, who are already familiar and confident with their scholar label, are more likely to embrace the mantra of 'publish and flourish'. Our findings, on the other hand, provide evidence for the compelling arguments made about the inequitable effects of dominant performative publication discourses on academics on the margins (Curry & Lillis, 2013;2014;2019;Thomson & Kamler, 2013;Hyland, 2016;Nygaard, 2017;Tusting, 2018). While the research did not explicitly seek to explore the influence of our location as researchers in the global South on our writer identities, the findings do point to the amplification of recognition work especially evident in the editorial efforts that looked towards global norms, which are in effect the norms of dominant Anglophone rich economies.…”

“…It is also closely associated with "an ideology of transformation" (Lillis, 2019:6) challenging and questioning dominant practices associated with academic writing. These characteristics, argues Lillis (2019: 5), encouraged the field's uptake in different geo-historical contexts and fostered rich "intellectual transnational conversations", especially between researchers in the UK and South Africa (also see Lillis (2019) for a detailed reference list of this scholarship in South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and Peru).…”

“…However, this aspect of an academic's role has become aligned with the commodification of knowledge production (Curry & Lillis, 2018) and "performative" (Thomson & Kamler, 2013:5) and "evaluation regimes" (Lillis (2012) in Curry & Lillis, 2019:1). While these pressures are acknowledged as a reality of academic life, a small body of research is interrogating the publish or perish trend and its consequences (Curry & Lillis, 2013;2014;2019;Nygaard, 2017;Tusting, 2018;Heron et al, 2020). This research offers insight into the experiences and responses of academics and institutions to these performative publication regimes.…”

Feedback cultures, histories and literacies: international postgraduate students’ experiences

“…It originates from the academic literacies approach (Lea and Street 1998) that conceptualises literacies as a complex set of social practices entangled in relational structures and shaped by social and cultural elements (Street 2003(Street , 2004Sutton 2012). Lillis and Tuck (2016) describe them as 'ideologically shaped, reflecting institutional structures and relations of power' (p. 30), an idea that is reflected in Gravett's recent work (2019Gravett's recent work ( , 2020. Learning environments in which feedback engagement occurs have been given greater importance in recent work (Chong 2021) as well as in seminal work on feedback literacy (Sutton 2012).…”

Textography as a Strategy for Investigation: Writing in Higher Education and in the Professions

“…There is a rich body of text analytic research that has examined the genres, and related rhetorical and textual features of texts, in particular in academic texts (see Shaw, 2016 for a review of this work). There is also a strong tradition of research carried out within an academic literacies perspective (see Lillis & Tuck, 2016) that focuses on the contexts in which writing takes place through ethnographic techniques such as interviews and observations, and which has provided rich insights into the lived experiences of writers, the practices in which they engage, the contexts in which these practices are located, and how these contexts shape literacy practices. In many cases, however, these two strands of research remain largely separated (Lillis & Curry, 2015).…”