"We're tryna improve our life everyday": Digital literacy in policy and practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, drawing on a Foucauldian framework, I explore how through processes of governmentality, neoliberal discourse is taken up in both policy (governance) and adult learner subjectivity (self-governance) pertaining to digital skills. To do this, I conducted critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Alberta’s Living Literacy policy framework, then used ethnographic methods to observe a basic digital literacy classroom and conduct interviews with adult learners. My findings indicate that literacy is a useful area for investigating how neoliberalism and entrepreneurial subjectivity are (re)produced in policy and social practice. This is done through individualizing and responsibilizing discourse at both policy and individual levels. However, I also identify how, despite the strong neoliberal tendencies of the policy, adult learners understand literacy as extending beyond the economic. For them, literacy is also a practice of community, representation, and health. Using these findings, I argue that literacy is a practice for improving one’s life – though not solely through economic means, despite the policy’s attempt to quantify and invest in literacy as an economic project toward innovation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".