The antipodean uses of literacy

Mark Gibson

pp. 187-197

in: Sue Owen (ed), Richard Hoggart and cultural studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

Can Richard Hoggart's ideas and inspiration be made to travel? I want to address this question through a reflection on the value of Hoggart's work for thinking about cultural literacies in Australia in the mid-2000s. There are pragmatic reasons for this focus. "Literacies' have recently become a hot topic in Australian public debates, particularly as a result of conservative diatribes about declining educational standards (see, for example, Donnelly, 2004), and the term has acquired considerable political leverage. Having long had an interest in Hoggart's work, I have thought of it immediately as an obvious place to start in taking these debates somewhere more interesting and edifying. But I think there are issues of more general interest in the attempt to translate this work to different contexts from that in which it developed.