Guy Merchant
Biographic Data
| ID | 94913 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Guy Merchant |
| GIVEN NAMES | Guy |
| FAMILY NAME | Merchant |
| SIGNATURE | MERCHANT G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Sheffield Hallam University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8436-7675 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
In memoriam Michele Knobel, PhD (1966–2021)
Why alternative perspectives are important
Not all educational research focuses on the experience of learners, the children and young people who are arguably at the heart of the process—and nor should it. Yet, the emphasis on the learner that has blossomed over the last 50 years, propelled in particular by the socio-cultural paradigm, has made an important and indelible contribution to educational discourse and practice. Most of this research has been undertaken by professional researcher…
Remembering Professional Commitments: Trusting in Teachers
In England statutory expectations for literacy education place little emphasis on contemporary modes and media of communication and, as such, are out of step with contemporary life. We explore how open-ended, collaborative pedagogies can provide rich contexts for authentic everyday communication even in the context of such reductionist curriculum and assessment frameworks. This leads us to claim that the success of such approaches depends on the …
Special issue series (two issues) of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy
What matters to teachers about literacy teaching: Exploring teachers’ everyday/everynight worlds through creative data visualisation
Destabilising data: The use of creative data visualisation to generate professional dialogue
Whilst there is plenty of debate on the nature and role of data in social science research, data in schools tend to be understood in terms of numbers and used in limited ways linked primarily to attainment. The ‘datafication’ of schooling has been strongly critiqued for its powerful impacts on policy and practice, pupils’ experience, the curriculum, teaching and learning, and —as is particularly relevant to this article—teachers’ professional and…
Returning to Text: Affect, Meaning Making, and Literacies
Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text interweaves in new ways with human activity, through social media, surveillance capitalism, and artificial i…
Undoing the Digital: Sociomaterialism and Literacy Education
Undoing the Digital challenges common ways of understanding digital technology and its relationships to literacy and literacy education. The book explores how a sociomaterial perspective can provide an alternative analysis of literacy in the context of digital communication. Introducing a series of conceptual tools and examples, the book examines digital communication as an emergent interweaving of social, material and semiotic resources. The per…
Literacy-as-event: Accounting for Relationality in Literacy Research
Research in New Literacy Studies has demonstrated how literacy consists of multiple socially and culturally situated practices illuminated through a focus on literacy events. Recently, this sociocultural perspective has been complemented by relational thinking that views literacy as an ongoing reassembling of the human and more-than-human. This conceptual article proposes that, in exploring how relational thinking might be deployed in literacy re…
Schooling the smartphone
Conceptualising digital technology integration in participatory theatre from a sociomaterialist perspective: Ways forward for research
Existing research on the use of technology in participatory theatre in education has paid little attention to the moment-to-moment unfolding that characterises the liveliness at the heart of such practice. In this conceptual article, we show how a sociomaterialist perspective can illuminate the contingent co-emergence of people, things and technologies that produces this liveliness of events. Perspectives drawn from actor-network theory are used …
The naughty person: Exploring dynamic aspects of identity and children's discourses before and during the Libyan Uprising
This article draws on data from an ethnography exploring young children's interactions in a multi-ethnic school in an urban area in the North of England. It focuses on the ways in which children explore and negotiate their identities against the shifting backdrop of local and global discourses about religion, race, gender and political change. In particular, we explore how children of the Libyan diaspora take up the semiotic resources available t…
The Challenge of 21st‐Century Literacies
In the second edition of their influential book New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning , Lankshear and Knobel argued that engagement with these practices was “largely confined to learners’ lives in spaces outside of schools.” That was nearly 10 years ago, and in some respects, very little has changed. In many classrooms, there is a lot more technology than there was back then; for instance, the provision of interactive whiteboa…
The (im)materiality of literacy: The Significance of Subjectivity to New Literacies Research
This article deconstructs the online and offline experience to show its complexities and idiosyncratic nature. It proposes a theoretical framework designed to conceptualise aspects of meaning-making across on- and offline contexts. In arguing for the ‘(im)materiality’ of literacy, it makes four propositions which highlight the complex and diverse relationships between the immaterial and material associated with meaning-making. Complementing exist…
Contact calls: Twitter as a dialogic social and linguistic practice
Critical Media Literacy
Media of various kinds play an increasingly important role in our everyday lives. With recent technological developments their reach has become ubiquitous and global.
Electric Involvement: Identity performance in children's informal digital writing
We inhabit a social world in which identity is complex, no longer closely tied to place or territory, delineated by nationhood, nor simply created, as psychology suggests, through acts of identification. Instead, it is argued, identity is produced through action and performance. Popular digital culture provides a rich context for identity play and performance, but the implications of this for education have only recently been identified. This pap…
Teenagers in cyberspace: An Investigation of Language Use and Language Change in Internet Chatrooms
This article reports on a small-scale investigation into the use of Internet chatrooms by teenage girls. Based on interview and observational data, it illustrates how the use of popular electronic communication is resulting in linguistic innovation within new, virtual social networks in a way that reflects more wide-reaching changes in the communication landscape. The paper suggests that teenagers and young people are in the vanguard of these pro…
Teenagers in cyberspace: An Investigation of Language Use and Language Change in Internet Chatrooms
This article reports on a small-scale investigation into the use of Internet chatrooms by teenage girls. Based on interview and observational data, it illustrates how the use of popular electronic communication is resulting in linguistic innovation within new, virtual social networks in a way that reflects more wide-reaching changes in the communication landscape. The paper suggests that teenagers and young people are in the vanguard of these pro…
Literacy-as-event: Accounting for Relationality in Literacy Research
Research in New Literacy Studies has demonstrated how literacy consists of multiple socially and culturally situated practices illuminated through a focus on literacy events. Recently, this sociocultural perspective has been complemented by relational thinking that views literacy as an ongoing reassembling of the human and more-than-human. This conceptual article proposes that, in exploring how relational thinking might be deployed in literacy re…
The (im)materiality of literacy: The Significance of Subjectivity to New Literacies Research
This article deconstructs the online and offline experience to show its complexities and idiosyncratic nature. It proposes a theoretical framework designed to conceptualise aspects of meaning-making across on- and offline contexts. In arguing for the ‘(im)materiality’ of literacy, it makes four propositions which highlight the complex and diverse relationships between the immaterial and material associated with meaning-making. Complementing exist…
Contact calls: Twitter as a dialogic social and linguistic practice
Returning to Text: Affect, Meaning Making, and Literacies
Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text interweaves in new ways with human activity, through social media, surveillance capitalism, and artificial i…
Destabilising data: The use of creative data visualisation to generate professional dialogue
Whilst there is plenty of debate on the nature and role of data in social science research, data in schools tend to be understood in terms of numbers and used in limited ways linked primarily to attainment. The ‘datafication’ of schooling has been strongly critiqued for its powerful impacts on policy and practice, pupils’ experience, the curriculum, teaching and learning, and —as is particularly relevant to this article—teachers’ professional and…
Electric Involvement: Identity performance in children's informal digital writing
We inhabit a social world in which identity is complex, no longer closely tied to place or territory, delineated by nationhood, nor simply created, as psychology suggests, through acts of identification. Instead, it is argued, identity is produced through action and performance. Popular digital culture provides a rich context for identity play and performance, but the implications of this for education have only recently been identified. This pap…
Conceptualising digital technology integration in participatory theatre from a sociomaterialist perspective: Ways forward for research
Existing research on the use of technology in participatory theatre in education has paid little attention to the moment-to-moment unfolding that characterises the liveliness at the heart of such practice. In this conceptual article, we show how a sociomaterialist perspective can illuminate the contingent co-emergence of people, things and technologies that produces this liveliness of events. Perspectives drawn from actor-network theory are used …
Teenagers in cyberspace: An Investigation of Language Use and Language Change in Internet Chatrooms
This article reports on a small-scale investigation into the use of Internet chatrooms by teenage girls. Based on interview and observational data, it illustrates how the use of popular electronic communication is resulting in linguistic innovation within new, virtual social networks in a way that reflects more wide-reaching changes in the communication landscape. The paper suggests that teenagers and young people are in the vanguard of these pro…
Electric Involvement: Identity performance in children's informal digital writing
We inhabit a social world in which identity is complex, no longer closely tied to place or territory, delineated by nationhood, nor simply created, as psychology suggests, through acts of identification. Instead, it is argued, identity is produced through action and performance. Popular digital culture provides a rich context for identity play and performance, but the implications of this for education have only recently been identified. This pap…
Critical Media Literacy
Media of various kinds play an increasingly important role in our everyday lives. With recent technological developments their reach has become ubiquitous and global.
Contact calls: Twitter as a dialogic social and linguistic practice
The (im)materiality of literacy: The Significance of Subjectivity to New Literacies Research
This article deconstructs the online and offline experience to show its complexities and idiosyncratic nature. It proposes a theoretical framework designed to conceptualise aspects of meaning-making across on- and offline contexts. In arguing for the ‘(im)materiality’ of literacy, it makes four propositions which highlight the complex and diverse relationships between the immaterial and material associated with meaning-making. Complementing exist…
The Challenge of 21st‐Century Literacies
In the second edition of their influential book New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning , Lankshear and Knobel argued that engagement with these practices was “largely confined to learners’ lives in spaces outside of schools.” That was nearly 10 years ago, and in some respects, very little has changed. In many classrooms, there is a lot more technology than there was back then; for instance, the provision of interactive whiteboa…
The naughty person: Exploring dynamic aspects of identity and children's discourses before and during the Libyan Uprising
This article draws on data from an ethnography exploring young children's interactions in a multi-ethnic school in an urban area in the North of England. It focuses on the ways in which children explore and negotiate their identities against the shifting backdrop of local and global discourses about religion, race, gender and political change. In particular, we explore how children of the Libyan diaspora take up the semiotic resources available t…
Schooling the smartphone
Conceptualising digital technology integration in participatory theatre from a sociomaterialist perspective: Ways forward for research
Existing research on the use of technology in participatory theatre in education has paid little attention to the moment-to-moment unfolding that characterises the liveliness at the heart of such practice. In this conceptual article, we show how a sociomaterialist perspective can illuminate the contingent co-emergence of people, things and technologies that produces this liveliness of events. Perspectives drawn from actor-network theory are used …
Undoing the Digital: Sociomaterialism and Literacy Education
Undoing the Digital challenges common ways of understanding digital technology and its relationships to literacy and literacy education. The book explores how a sociomaterial perspective can provide an alternative analysis of literacy in the context of digital communication. Introducing a series of conceptual tools and examples, the book examines digital communication as an emergent interweaving of social, material and semiotic resources. The per…
Literacy-as-event: Accounting for Relationality in Literacy Research
Research in New Literacy Studies has demonstrated how literacy consists of multiple socially and culturally situated practices illuminated through a focus on literacy events. Recently, this sociocultural perspective has been complemented by relational thinking that views literacy as an ongoing reassembling of the human and more-than-human. This conceptual article proposes that, in exploring how relational thinking might be deployed in literacy re…
Remembering Professional Commitments: Trusting in Teachers
In England statutory expectations for literacy education place little emphasis on contemporary modes and media of communication and, as such, are out of step with contemporary life. We explore how open-ended, collaborative pedagogies can provide rich contexts for authentic everyday communication even in the context of such reductionist curriculum and assessment frameworks. This leads us to claim that the success of such approaches depends on the …
Special issue series (two issues) of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy
What matters to teachers about literacy teaching: Exploring teachers’ everyday/everynight worlds through creative data visualisation
Destabilising data: The use of creative data visualisation to generate professional dialogue
Whilst there is plenty of debate on the nature and role of data in social science research, data in schools tend to be understood in terms of numbers and used in limited ways linked primarily to attainment. The ‘datafication’ of schooling has been strongly critiqued for its powerful impacts on policy and practice, pupils’ experience, the curriculum, teaching and learning, and —as is particularly relevant to this article—teachers’ professional and…
Returning to Text: Affect, Meaning Making, and Literacies
Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text interweaves in new ways with human activity, through social media, surveillance capitalism, and artificial i…
In memoriam Michele Knobel, PhD (1966–2021)
Why alternative perspectives are important
Not all educational research focuses on the experience of learners, the children and young people who are arguably at the heart of the process—and nor should it. Yet, the emphasis on the learner that has blossomed over the last 50 years, propelled in particular by the socio-cultural paradigm, has made an important and indelible contribution to educational discourse and practice. Most of this research has been undertaken by professional researcher…
Psychology (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Literacy, Media, and Education (8 works) · Literacy (7 works) · Child Development and Digital Technology (5 works) · Mathematics education (5 works) · Linguistics (4 works)