Abstract

Literacy has long featured in social policy as a crucial resource with regard to the maintenance and renewal of modern society, and the emergence of abstraction and differentiation as organising principles for production and sensibility. Literacy in this view is most commonly conceived as a distinctive form of human capital, deeply implicated in social dynamics, institutional capacity, and political and economic order (Coulombe & Tremblay, 2004). It can be argued, however, that a human capital perspective is a limited frame for understanding literacy, at least in its fullest, most generative sense. Indeed, it may be far more appropriate to work with an expanded notion of ‘capitals’, and more specifically with certain understandings of social capital, particularly with regard to how literacy figures in rural social development. ¹