This dissertation explored the ways in which the everyday life practices of most urban Indians embodied the "modernization of tradition" (Hancock, 1999) and the role that media texts played in facilitating and encouraging this modernization. The research is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted from June through December 2005, in the south-Indian city of Chennai, which has traditionally been regarded as a conservative city. Examining the Indian media as a discursive site where normative ideologies are not only constructed but also co-constructed, the study explored and examined how the discourses of tradition and modernity were contested in the south Indian media. It also identified and interpreted the ways in which dominant ideologies at the nexus of color/caste and gender/morality were negotiated by an urban city and its residents in the move towards modernity.Data included three different but inter-related sub-genres of print media texts -- visual images, textual advertisements, and news articles. The primary dataset of visual images consisted of 300 product advertisements culled from four, nationally available, English-language magazines gathered from the two genres of news and film. Textual data sets comprising the matrimonial advertisements and the news articles were gathered from the local editions of two nationally-available English-language newspapers. The broader ethnographic investigation included participant observations, individual formal and informal interviews, and focus group discussions with adult residents of Chennai. The data were analyzed using a multi-discursive and multidisciplinary approach. The analyses were informed by conceptual approaches which included: social semiotics and the multimodal theory of communication, genre analysis, critical discourse and feminist critical discourse analyses, and alternative modernities.In examining the media texts as the site where dominant sociocultural ideologies were being constantly configured and reconfigured, the analyses identified and examined the workings of three interconnected themes - fairness (in relation to skin color), gender, and morality. Through these themes, the dissertation examined the larger contestations and negotiations between the discourses of traditions and modernities as experienced by adult residents of urban Chennai. The discourses of identity construction and reconstruction were thus examined at the nexus of the individual self situated within the larger frame of the city.

This ethnographic study examines the local (Indigenous) language literacy practices and literacy events in their specific sociocultural contexts in two Indigenous language communities in Mexico. The languages of these two communities are among over 200 Indigenous languages of Mexico still spoken today, despite half a millennium of pressure against Indigenous languages by speakers of Spanish. The focus of this study is on how these languages, Mela'tajtol (Isthmus Nahuat), and Ngigua (Northern Popoloca), are being used today in their written form. Both the Mela'tajtol and SM Ngigua communities have a history of literacy practices in their own language, albeit not yet extensive. The social practices surrounding the uses of print compose what I have called landscapes of literacy. In my research I observed new contexts produced through texts and practices in the Mela'tajtol and SM Ngigua language communities. The research brings to light the significance of the geographic, historic and linguistic contexts of both communities, and the importance of recognizing the multilayered relationships of power among those involved in writing their languages. What emerges is a compelling picture of an unprecedented collaboration in each community between bilingual teachers motivated by national pressure to teach reading and writing of their language in the schools, and the principal participants of the study, who are not bilingual teachers, but who hold resources and skills they are eager to share in promoting their language in written form. The dissertation reviews frameworks of language planning and proposes a framework of power and human agency to further describe the layers of social meaning and responsibility identified and described in the research. This symbiotic relationship is also found in the national and international influences and resources for promoting the use of indigenous languages of Mexico in written form at the local levels (including the Mela'tajtol and SM Ngigua languages). UNESCO's recognition of challenges to literacy at the global level are compared to the challenges found regarding literacy in the local languages of the two communities of study. Implications are presented for further research, as well as recommendations for the two communities and other people of power involved in indigenous language cultivation.

This ethnographic study of language use and English language learners in Central Java, Indonesia examines globalization processes within and beyond language; processes of language shift and change in language ecologies; and critical and comprehensive approaches to the teaching of English around the world. From my position as teacher-researcher and insider-outsider in an undergraduate English Department and the community surrounding the university, I engaged in reflections with students and educators in examining local language ecologies; needs for and access to English language resources; and how English majors negotiated "double positionalities" as both members of a global community of English speakers and experts in local meaning systems within which English forms played a role. In order to understand English, language ecologies, and globalization in situ, I triangulated these findings with language and education policy creation and negotiation at micro-, meso- and macro- levels, (Blommaert, 2005; Hornberger & Hult, 2010; McCarty, 2011; Pennycook, 2001, 2010).Globalization is found to be part and parcel of the distribution of English around the world; however, English's presence around the world is understood to be just one manifestation of contemporary globalization. More salient are the internationalization of standards, global corporate and media flows of information, and access to educational and information resources. These are all regulated by the state which, while working to maintain an Indonesian identity, relegates local languages to peripheries in space and time, and regulates access to all language resources, creating an upward spiral of peripheralization wherein the levels of proficiency in local, national, and English languages represent access gained to state-provided educational resources.