This book examines how people rely on social networks to manage day-to-day life in modern textually dense and technologically complex environments, focusing on the work of literacy mediators —people who help other people to read and write texts. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a small rural Australian town, the author paints a portrait of literacy mediators as they engage in everyday relationships with neighbours, colleagues and service users. It suggests that literacy mediation has much in common with other forms of unpaid or poorly paid feminised care labour. It hides in plain sight because of the inability of dominant neoliberal education perspectives to value informal, affective and relationally led pedagogies. This book takes a sociocultural approach to literacy, suggesting that literacy is not a singular cognitive or psychological process, as standardised tests and curriculum would suggest, but rather a shared practice that emerges from, and is shaped by, the everyday demands of life and work. A major contribution to existing accounts of adult literacy, this book will be of interest to doctoral students, researchers, and scholars involved in the fields of literacy studies, critical language studies, and welfare studies.
