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This anthology is the outcome of a Nordic literacy-conference held at Umeå University in Sweden in June 2012, where the focus was vernacular literacy practices of the past, of the present and of the future. Vernacular literacy practices have become increasingly prominent in everyday life, especially in social media through digital technology. However, vernacular literacy is not a new phenomenon. The written word has been used for everyday purposes throughout history, in various media and using different technologies. Twenty papers from the conference are presented in this volume, with a predominance of articles dealing with the past. The historical section embraces literacy practices through the Viking Age

to the beginning of the twentieth century in Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Estonia. The contemporary section includes workplace literacies, digital literacies and literacy practices in the educational domain in a Swedish context.

The volume is multi-lingual with articles in English and in the Scandinavian languages. The articles written in Swedish, Danish or Norwegian are accompanied by abstracts in English. The conference was hosted and organized by the Nordic network Vernacular Literacies, in cooperation with the Nordic project Reading and Writing from Below, and was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (‘The Swedish foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences’). Letterstedska föreningen and the Department of Language Studies at Umeå University have contributed to the production of the volume.