Call for papers - Literacy as Numbers: Researching the Politics and Practices of Literacy Assessment Regimes

Institute of Education, University of London
17 June 2013

Large-scale enumerative projects of literacy assessment are increasingly global in scope and impacting on educational policy and practice. This symposium on 'Literacy as Numbers' will bring together academics, research students and policy makers who apply critical policy, ethnographic and sociological research perspectives to investigate the politics and practices of literacy assessment regimes.

The 1 day event will be structured around themes including but not limited to the following:

■ The politics of literacy measurement regimes: globalisation, closed and open politics, transparency and public deliberation, numbers in policy discourse; local responses to global policy agendas.
■ Approaching literacy assessment through ethnographic and socio-material enquiry: multi-sited and institutional ethnography, Actor Network Theory; networks, flows of ideas and resources.
■ The politics and practices of cross-cultural literacy assessment: test item adaptation, translation and Differential Item Functioning (DIF), and the ideologies of test items and constructs.
■ The enumerative, ideological and semiotic politics and practices: including common scales, levels and thresholds, ranking and comparison.

This symposium is organised by University of East Anglia, Lancaster University and the Institute of Education. We invite contributions from interested scholars regardless of their discipline. Our intention is that the symposium will lead to an edited volume or journal special issue.

Abstracts of up to 300 words for papers or proposals for posters should be submitted to Camilla Addey c.addey@uea.ac.uk by 17 December 2012.