Abstract

This paper discusses the process and results of a study which set out to better understand the relationships between the local meanings assigned to the concept of ‘academic literacy’ by a team of university lecturers, and the implications of these meanings for both teaching and learning, and for developing a sustainable university preparation course for Indigenous Australians. During the research process it became important to develop the means to see significant patterns in the participants’ information without predetermining the thematic and semantic categories of analysis. The research led to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, which provided a means to frame the collective and individual nature of lecturers’ meaning-making as rhizomic or networked. This led further to the work of Bruno Latour and Actor Network Theory, otherwise known as the sociology of translation. The combination of these two ideas, the rhizome and ANT, provided the basis of a conceptual framework that enabled the interrogation of the participants’ responses as narrative and networked data. By investigating ‘academic literacy’ as a networked actor-entity, it became possible to see something of lecturers’ processes of world building and the rhizomic nature of the knowledges and processes that shaped ‘academic literacy’, and were in turn, shaped by it.