Abstract The International Fair and Museum of the Prophet’s Biography employs immersive, technologically enabled multimedia to depict socio-historical moments from the life of Prophet Muhammad and his companions in Medina (formerly Yathrib) following the sacred event of hijrah . Informed by this, the study develops a tripartite theoretical framework to analyze these depictions. Data are drawn from selected exhibits, including representations of ancient Medina after hijrah , the Prophet’s Chamber, and the Minbar within the Prophet’s Mosque. The analysis yields three key findings. First, Sacred Timespace emerges as a dialectical construct linking past and present, generating a-temporal moments that transform historical archetypes into an enduring present. Second, the museum cityscape of Medina post- hijrah illustrates a kinetic semiosis that evokes topophilia – an affective bond between visitors and sacred place. Third, the resemiotized visual-ideational meanings of the Prophet’s Chamber and Minbar articulate Sacred Timespace, where interactive narration and architectural representation confer sanctified, extratemporal qualities.

This book offers an intimate ethnographic window into the ways Chinese Muslims produce, maintain, and transmit religious, cultural, and historical knowledge through their everyday practices ofheritage literacy.Sino-Muslims in China inhabit a unique landscape of religious and spiritual expression, shaped by the intersections of the Islamic faith with Chinese cultural traditions, and where the spoken and written word plays a vital role in sustaining Islamic heritage across generations. Drawing from multiple personal narratives across diverse regions — including Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Qinghai, Gansu, Jilin, Henan, and Hong Kong SAR — this book illuminates the lived experiences of Chinese Muslims as they navigate the intersections of faith, language, and identity. These accounts trace practices of heritage literacy shaped by migration, linguistic-semiotic ideologies, life-cycle rituals, and forms of artistic expression. The authors show how practices of heritage literacy, rooted in Islamic traditions yet responsive to contemporary shifts, tether Sino-Muslims to a broader sense of Muslimness while also anchoring them in local Chinese cultural and historical milieus and diverse linguistic traditions. This interdisciplinary study offers new insights into the significance of heritage literacy in linguistic anthropological study, and the vital role of narrative in preserving and articulating Islamic heritage in China’s evolving sociocultural landscape.

Abstract Literacy education and policy have long been central to China’s national development agenda, particularly within rural areas where disparities in access and outcomes remain acute. This scoping review maps the existing literature on literacy policy and implementations in China with a specific focus on how literacy challenges manifest across urban-rural divides. This review identifies and analyses eight eligible studies published between 2003 and 2025 in English and Chinese. Our findings indicate a persistent gap in literacy outcomes between rural and urban populations, shaped by factors such as limited educational infrastructure, weak policy enforcement, economic pressures, and health-related challenges. Moreover, we highlight the under-representation of rural and adult literacy in international academic literature, and argue that current research remains insufficient to fully capture the lived realities of literacy within China’s rural communities. This review contributes to raising awareness of the multifaceted challenges of literacy education across urban and rural areas in China, and points to the need for a dedicated and multi-perspectival research agenda for literacy that prioritises contextually-grounded and ethnographically informed approaches which illuminate how literacy is lived and experienced in China’s rural communities. In doing so, it can provide a valuable basis for comparative studies in regions facing similar literacy challenges.

This study explores how the scholarly writing practices of early-career academics in China create new “ecologies” of research writing. Using a literacy studies framing, we examine how productivity policies, including evaluation and incentivization, impact the writing practices of academics working in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), creating a set of spatiotemporal predicaments and uncertainties. We draw on interviews and multimodal journals obtained from 22 academics at Chinese universities. Findings reveal important practices among China’s HSS academics within the distinctive institutional and policy landscape of Chinese academia, including how they organize their space and time for writing, the significance and function of writing practices, and the ways in which boundaries are disrupted and negotiated. We show that writing is deeply intertwined with multiple spaces and times, forming an ecology of research writing within emergent and shifting assemblages. We emphasize the need for further theoretical and practical understanding of research writing in the context of Chinese universities.

The ‘sociolinguistics of Islam’ refers to the exploration of how language and society intersect within contexts where the Islamic faith is the defining worldview shaping language, literacy, and other processes of semiosis. This article proposes a heuristic that extends sociolinguistic scholarship by advancing a research agenda focussed on Islamic sociolinguistic ecologies. We demonstrate how Islam’s rather stable textual historicity is in constant dialogue with local language ecologies, resulting in a plethora of contemporary and localized variations in spoken and written discourses and auditory cultures. A sociolinguistics of Islam not only traverses various subfields of applied linguistics, but necessitates the incorporation of theology, multilingualism, and historicity into its analytic inquiry. We argue that this framework confers us with greater theoretical and methodological purchase on how various languages adapt—or resist—the influence of Islam in autochthonous discourses, particularly in contexts where Muslim populations expand, leading to diverse forms of religious vernacularisation. This article sets the foundations for inquiry into how Islam influences language policy, learning, religious expression, and sociolinguistic phenomena within Muslim communities worldwide.

This article explores the existential implications of AI-assisted writing and the rise of ‘post-authorship pedagogy.’ It refers to a condition where the human subject is no longer the exclusive arbitrator or the primary originator of thought and expression in higher education. AI’s auto-ideation not only predetermines meaning but also initiates a moment of ‘singularity’ characterized by post-authorship communication. As theorized here, it signals not the Barthesian death of the author but their replacement—an ontological shift in which authorship itself is outsourced, diminished, and reconfigured. This article examines the philosophical and pedagogical stakes of this shift: What happens to communication when human authorship is eclipsed by AI and manufactured via the high-tech manipulation of existing content? How might we reconceive pedagogy in a post-authorship age, where the learner’s tools for thinking are displaced and silenced by intelligent systems? The pedagogical implications include reducing the instructor to the role of a gatekeeper or AI intermediary, while the learner emerges as someone disengaged from the emotional and cognitive struggles traditionally involved in the act of expression. This Point of Departure argues that these are moments of pedagogical singularity and sites of existential rupture, offering pathways through which higher education teaching might not only respond but be reimagined.

Critical Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) literacy cannot be reduced to a universal framework. Rather, it must be understood as a constellation of situated literacies, shaped by disciplinary perspectives, socio-political contexts, and technological affordances. This multi-authored article explores the emerging concept of critical GenAI literacy and its postdigital configurations. Fourteen authors contributed with different sections, followed by five author-reviewers who examined the article as a whole. The objective was to invite diverse perspectives, constructive critique, and promote collaborative efforts to develop a clearer and more inclusive understanding of critical GenAI literacy. The introduction focuses on establishing some initial assumptions about what we mean by ‘critical’ in general, and for GenAI literacy in particular, and why a conjunction of postdigital configurations of the construct emerges as an adequate methodological solution. In the main part of the article, some authors focus on the concept of ‘literacies’ as a starting point for their reflection, while others directly examine critical GenAI literacy through a postdigital perspective. We conclude that critical GenAI literacy requires moving beyond technical skills to engage with AI’s epistemological, ethical, and relational dimensions, ensuring learners critically interrogate its role in knowledge production. Future inquiry should focus on integrating this literacy into education in ways that promote social justice, epistemic diversity, and democratic participation.

In this article, we explore the concept of heritage literacy as it emerged within a study of Hong Kong's Muslim communities. The research draws from the fields of literacy studies and linguistic anthropology, and utilises data from three respondents gathered using qualitative procedures, including repeat interviews, observations of heritage-related activities, and the collection of heritage artefacts. Our study finds that a range of heritage literacy practices occur in various community spaces and homes, are characteristically translingual and transmodal, and interconnect with everyday heritage practices in ways that may diverge from classical forms. Further, the ways that people adopt or adapt religious heritage marks this out as something that evolves over time and a way to resource heritage futures. We thus argue that the construct of heritage in our work is not a generic outcome of heritage language or heritage education, but stems from the specific literacy practices embedded within particular material and multi-voiced discursive arrangements. Building on these key dimensions, this paper presents a typology for heritage literacy inquiry, distinguishing it markedly from heritage language studies. It further advocates for the value of heritage literacy as a heuristic tool within multilingual and multicultural contexts, grounded in seven key principles.

This collective article presents a theoretical kaleidoscope, the multiple lenses of which are used to examine and critique citizen science and humanities in postdigital contexts and from postdigital perspectives. It brings together 19 short theoretical and experiential contributions, organised into six loose groups which explore areas and perspectives including Indigenous and local knowledge, technology, and children and young people as citizen researchers. It suggests that this collective approach is appropriate because both postdigital and citizen research are founded on and committed to collaboration, dialogue, and co-creation, as well as challenging the tenets and approaches of traditional academic research. In particular, it suggests that postdigital transformations in contemporary societies are both changing citizen science and humanities and making it more important.

Never formally colonised by Western powers, Thailand is a rapidly developing nation in Southeast Asia. To outsiders, the assumption might be that Thailand is a homogenous Thai-speaking Buddhist country. However, such over-simplistic views ignore diversity and the existence of de facto multilingualism and multiculturalism on the ground. This linguistic landscape (LL) study explores a unique and sociolinguistically compelling area called ‘Little Arabia’ (Soi Arab) in the heart of Bangkok, where elements of both Islamic and Buddhist civilisations meet. The existence of this Middle Eastern enclave creates a sense of contrasts on linguistic, religious, and cultural levels. Because of globalisation and spurred by (medical and sex) tourism, this area boasts a number of halal restaurants, hotels, travel agencies, stores, pharmacies, and clinics. This gives rise to an interesting sociolinguistic ecology, featuring an ‘ethnic’ economy which caters to the needs of tourists and businessmen hailing from the Arab world. Drawing on authentic photographic data, this study explores how various linguistic practices give the area a unique identity. More specifically, we reveal how various languages (including Arabic, Thai, and English) are mobilised and combined in ways that illustrate translation practices evidenced within the enclave for particularised marketing, commercial, and communication purposes. Theoretically and conceptually, the term ‘machine-translated multilingualism’ is coined to capture the growing trend for businesses to resort to translation software for multilingual communication, which may result in non-standard translations and orthographic forms. This study contributes to a growing body of sociolinguistic research examining LLs in global cities and commercial hubs in the Global South, particularly those arising from ‘South-South’ population flows.

This article is a collective response to the 2003 iteration of James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Gee’s book, a foundational text for those working in game studies, literacy studies, and education, identified 36 principles of ‘good learning’ which he argued were built into the design of good games, and which have since been used to unsettle the landscape of formal education. This article brings together 21 short theoretical and empirical contributions which centre postdigital perspectives to re-engage with, and extend, the arguments first raised by Gee regarding the relationship between videogames and learning. Organised into five groups, these contributions suggest that concepts and attitudes associated with the postdigital offer new thinking tools for challenging grand narrative claims about the educative potential of technologies while also providing rich analytical frames for revisiting Gee’s claims in terms of postdigital videogame literacies.

Abstract What we in this article describe as “Sino-Muslim heritage literacies” have existed in China for as long as there have been Muslims in the region (since the 7th century according to the best evidence). The community’s religious and heritage literacy practices can incorporate a systematic Arabic representation of Chinese, systems of Chinese characters representing Arabic pronunciation, and more contemporary digitalised manifestations of heritage literacy in everyday life. Using a social practice approach to literacy, this paper reports on multi-generational interviews, artefact collection, and ethnographic observations with two families in Xi’an (Shaanxi, China) to explore how heritage literacy practices maintain a presence in Sino-Muslim life through traditional systems of community and religious education and contemporary social and material networks. We discuss what these empirical cases reveal about literacies in Sino-Muslim religious life, with respect to how heritage is adapted or diminished across generations. We also argue that it is crucial to situate Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in spaces beyond rigid and state-defined ethnic and religious discourses which tend to confine the identity of Sino-Muslims into officially designated categories. Doing so, we contend, has useful theoretical and methodological import, and can shed light on inquiry about heritage literacy in other minority settings.

This Element examines the semiotics of Sino-Muslim heritage literacy in a way that integrates its Perso-Arabic textual qualities with broader cultural semiotic forms. Using data from images of the linguistic landscape of Sino-Muslim life alongside interviews with Sino-Muslims about their heritage, the author examines how signs of 'Muslimness' are displayed and manipulated in both covert and overt means in different contexts. In so doing the author offers a 'semiotics of Muslimness' in China and considers how forms of language and materiality have the power to inspire meanings and identifications for Sino-Muslims and understanding of their heritage literacy. The author employs theoretical tools from linguistic anthropology and an understanding of semiotic assemblage to demonstrate how signifiers of Chinese Muslimness are invoked to substantiate heritage and Sino-Muslim identity constructions even when its expression must be covert, liminal, and unconventional.