Literacies under neoliberalism: Enabling ethnonationalism and transnationalism

Literacies under neoliberalism: Enabling ethnonationalism and transnationalism

This chapter aims to provide an overview of neoliberalism’s impact on literacy education—how it intersects with ethnonationalism to produce new configurations of inequality and discrimination along old lines of ethno-linguistic and racial difference. We first define key concepts, review the extant literature on the role of neoliberalism in education, and discuss current concerns for literacies under neoliberalism and how they intertwine with transnationalism. We share examples from research and practice to describe digital technology’s central role in enabling (and challenging) ethnonationalism and shaping transnationalism. We share excerpts from our research that demonstrate how digital and internet-based technologies are involved in promoting neoliberalism in education and offer spaces for critical literacies to challenge and complicate discourses around ethnonationalism and transnationalism. In closing, we outline possible next steps as actionable implications for critical literacies scholars and educators to counter the potential effects of neoliberalism on literacies education and, more broadly, global citizenship.

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