introduction

[Dena Attar]

Thanks for accepting me as a Discours subscriber.

I am currently a research student at the Graduate Centre for Culture and Communications (Women’s Studies area) at Sussex University in the UK. My research centres on the gendering of electronic literacy in relation to Internet texts, in various social contexts. I am particularly interested in new readers of Internet texts, what texts they choose to read, how they use them, where and why. The fieldwork will mainly be based in public access and group settings in the inner-city in London and possibly one other UK location.

As I am studying texts, readers and contexts together, it’s hard to locate the research I’m currently doing within a single discipline. I am following Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen to some extent in assuming the multi-modality of texts, and I’m also looking at "situated knowledge" and rhetoric (see "Critiques of Knowing", Lynette Hunter). Literacy in social context is another point of departure. Alongside that, there is a wealth of research and theory on gender and computing to draw on, but I don’t yet know exactly how this work will fit in with it. 

>From 1996 to the end of 1998 I was a researcher on the Fact & Fiction Gender and Literacy project at Southampton University. The project investigated the gendering of literacy in the 7 – 9 year old age group, using a range of methods: classroom observation, interviews, recordings of literacy events, photography and bibliographic data collection. 

I have previously researched the history and politics of home economics teaching, and nineteenth century domestic manuals. I taught Gender & Education and related courses at the Open University for a number of years.

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