Exploring the Nexus of Literacy, Language and Identity: Extending Bourdieu’s conceptual framework for literacy as a social practice

This paper draws on recent theoretical work in the study of literacy education, where literacy is conceptualized as a social practice, before setting forth how a Bourdieusian framework may be applied to questions surrounding language, literacy, and social identity. We first discuss the policy context around key literacy debates showing how policy has shaped literacy before positioning recent theorizations of literacy which draw attention to its fundamental social nature. Our interest here is how literacy and identity are inextricably linked where literacy has the capacity to reinforce wider social processes of social exclusion.