The ideaological model

Street (1993)

• Provides the main criticism to Good & Watt

• Literacy has no single, fixed meaning or effect → what literacy is depends on the social practices.

• There is no literacy, only literacies - It is not a uniform technology

Hispanic women in LA - Street (1993)

• Hispanic women in Los Angeles perform the literacy work of the household like paying bills and dealing with social services but are labelled as illiterate by their husbands, who use more spoken English in public employment.

Collins (1995)

• Literacy is not a universal force - argues for situated literacies shaped by cultural and historical practices

• Great Divide models are flawed for assuming Western superiority

Power

• Drawing on Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault, Collins argues that literacy is tied to power

• It enables governance, marginalises oral knowledge and produces stratified identitites via through institutions like schools and state documentation.

Power and dominion - Gow (1990)

• Among the Piro literacy was traditionally linked to colonial power but was reinterpreted via shamanism

• Literacy’s meaning comes from historical power relations, not inherent properties.

Archambault (2011)

• Mobile phones reshape relationships in context-specific ways

• Technologies like literacy have no fixed effects but depending on use create variable results