“My specialisation is in the area now described as academic literacies research, which is recognised internationally as a significant field of enquiry. My intellectual project has been to use critical discourse analysis alongside ethnographic methods to analyse students’ hybrid ‘interim literacies’,” she says.

Her work addresses CHED’s mission to promote equity of access, effectiveness of teaching and learning and the enhancement of the curriculum across UCT, and has provided a more multilayered understanding of the linguistic and cultural resources that South African students from rural and working-class backgrounds bring to their academic studies. It has brought to light the complex discursive processes by which students ”learn” their subject. Further, by focusing on the historical and social context of a particular discipline (economics, which is what her PhD focused on), a discipline that has been underrepresented in research, her work has made a significant contribution to the field.

“More recently, my research could be described as extending the theory and methods used in my doctoral research to other levels and other disciplines. My particular contribution has been to use theoretical perspectives on discourse, genre and voice to explore genre acquisition at the postgraduate level. During this period, I also developed an interest in the theory and methodology of academic literacies research.”

The first, Risk in Academic Writing: Postgraduate teachers, their students and the making of knowledge, was edited by Lucia Thesen and Linda Cooper of CHED and funded by a grant from the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity (PERC). The result of almost five years of collaboration, the book argues that the writing of research raises many dilemmas for both students and supervisors. Framed as risk-taking, these dilemmas should be seen as a productive force in teaching, learning and writing that can challenge the silences and erasures in academic traditions and conventions of writing. Widening participation and the internationalisation of higher education make questions of language, register, agency and identity in postgraduate writing all the more pressing. The book offers a powerful argument against the further reinforcement of anglophone understanding of knowledge and its production and dissemination.

The second book, titled Surfacing Possibilities: What it means to work with first generation higher education students, was edited by June Pym and Moragh Paxton, both from CHED. This book offers a case study of an effective education development initiative at UCT. It focuses on the challenges faced by first-generation undergraduate students who come from a diversity of linguistic, social, and cultural backgrounds and have often experienced disadvantage, which calls for different directions in teaching, learning and support. The book emphasises the importance of harnessing student agency rather than working with a deficit model, and contains varied contributions that describe the diverse and innovative ways in which the challenges faced by first-generation undergraduate students have been addressed.