UCT Inaugural Lecture: Professor Arlene Archer
Critical access to Higher Education: A multimodal approach to academic literacies
Professor Archer will deliver a thought-provoking lecture titled “Critical access to Higher Education: A multimodal approach to academic literacies”.
Date: Tuesday, 12 August 2025
Time: 17:45 SAST
Venue: D-school, The Atrium, Ground Floor, on Middle Campus.
It is important to recognize the potentials for inclusion and exclusion carried by language and writing, especially in South Africa where unequal educational systems still prevail. This inaugural lecture looks at ways of enabling student access to writing and dominant forms of assessment in Higher Education. As the head of the Writing Centre for the past 26 years Arlene Archer has focused on the negotiation between students’ lifeworlds and the new ideas and genres they encounter at university. To this end, her research identifies the ways in which a range of students’ resources can be harnessed to engage with dominant practices. She argues that recognition of students’ resources is key to a transformative agenda in Higher Education where decontextualized models of student support persist and students continue to be constructed as ‘lacking’ in some way.
Professor Archer is a Professor in Applied Linguistics and head of the Writing Centre at UCT. Her research and teaching employ a multimodal perspective to interrogate issues around social justice, academic writing and academic literacies in Higher Education. She has over 80 publications, including four edited books, and has served as the principal investigator on six internationally funded research projects. She is a a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) and has an honorary doctorate from Orebro University, Sweden. Arlene is co-founding editor of the SAGE journal Multimodality and Society and is a B1-rated researcher.