An exploration of students from the African diaspora negotiating academic literacies

The thesis explores the experiences of a group of university students with African diasporic connections, an under-researched group in UK HE. Building on the traditions of ideological and ethnographic approaches to academic literacies research, the thesis highlights power relations involved in a range of life experiences, social practices and institutional power relations. The study offers a complex reading of the student experience focusing on the negotiation of literacy practices. It presents non-traditional undergraduates as complex individuals with a range of abilities and resources to draw on for knowledge making which are constantly being reshaped by their diasporic identities, power relations within the academy and wider context beyond the university setting. Research findings evoke a reciprocal exchange between disciplinary understandings, knowledge making and poststructural conceptions of identity. More specifically, while the students I worked with were assessed in unfavourable ways, they displayed a range of resources for knowledge making stemming from a complex interchange between cultural and social identification, an applied social science curriculum and the negotiation of high stakes written assignments. The thesis offers an enhanced understanding of undergraduates as knowledge makers, the resources they bring to the academy and how, at times, they are positioned by others as they negotiate what is required of them. In doing so, an alternative image of the multilingual, non-traditional undergraduate and the potential resources they have is provided. The thesis is also concerned with the broader and less distinct phenomena of globalisation, migration and social exclusion and their impact on current understandings of the student experience within contemporary UK HE. As a result, the main contribution to knowledge can be said to centre on understandings of the scope of academic literacies research, what it means to be a nontraditional learner in HE and critical perspectives on the nature of higher education in the contemporary world.