Undoing the Digital challenges common ways of understanding digital technology and its relationships to literacy and literacy education. The book explores how a sociomaterial perspective can provide an alternative analysis of literacy in the context of digital communication.

Introducing a series of conceptual tools and examples, the book examines digital communication as an emergent interweaving of social, material and semiotic resources. The perspective invites literacy research to focus more on the relations associated with the process of making meaning: the new collaborations, stories, conceptualisations, directions, and intentions that take shape in, and also help to shape, the contemporary mediascape.

Drawing on studies conducted in a variety of contexts, this book is key reading for all advanced students and researchers of literacy and digital media within Education, Applied Linguistics and Media/Communication Studies.

Cathy Burnett is Professor of Literacy and Education at Sheffield Hallam University where she leads the Language and Literacy in Education Research Group. Her research focuses on relationships between literacy and technology in and beyond educational settings. She is President of the United Kingdom Literacy Association.

Guy Merchant is Professor of Literacy and Education in the Institute of Education at Sheffield Hallam University. He specialises in research on children and young people's uses of digital communication. He is a founding editor of the Journal Early Childhood Literacy and co-author with Cathy Burnett of New Media in the Classroom (2018).

Undoing the Digital challenges common ways of understanding digital technology and its relationships to literacy and literacy education. The book explores how a sociomaterial perspective can provide an alternative analysis of literacy in the context of digital communication.

Introducing a series of conceptual tools and examples, the book examines digital communication as an emergent interweaving of social, material and semiotic resources. The perspective invites literacy research to focus more on the relations associated with the process of making meaning: the new collaborations, stories, conceptualisations, directions, and intentions that take shape in, and also help to shape, the contemporary mediascape.

Drawing on studies conducted in a variety of contexts, this book is key reading for all advanced students and researchers of literacy and digital media within Education, Applied Linguistics and Media/Communication Studies.

List of tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Undoing the Digital
2. The Instability of Things
3. Making new sense of literacy
4. In the Event
5. Approaching Method from a Sociomaterial Perspective
6. An ethic of caring
7. Enchantment
8. Rethinking literacy and education

Index