This article considers the papers in this issue as empirical contributions to the ethnography of literacy paradigm and locates them in the larger debate about theory and methodology in literacy studies to be found in a range of recent publications. I hook those accounts of literacy pedagogy; multi-modality; and of the relationship between the local and the global, to broader political and ideological questions. I challenge some critiques of new Literacy Studies that consider it over privileges the 'local' and argue that literacy is always instantiated, its potential realised, through local practices. This must also be true of other, multi-modal communicative practices. I argue, then, that the task of literacy studies is to provide rich and complex accounts of multimodality in the context of the power dimension of local/global relations. We can then come back to the question of literacy and pedagogy, from the outside as it were, recognising the importance of out-of-school communicative practices. The papers in this volume represent a powerful move in that direction.
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