Andrew Whitworth is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Manchester and Programme Director of the MA: Digital Technologies, Communication and Education. He has written many chapters and articles on DMIL, and was the author of Information Obesity with Chandos Publishing. He has presented the ideas surrounding A critical theory of information literacy in keynotes at various conferences including Creating Knowledge VI, Information literacy: A way of life? and the IFLA/UNESCO conference in Moscow which led to the Moscow Declaration on Media and Information Literacy. His Media and Information Literacy course at Manchester was named as an exemplar of the field by the Learning Literacies in a Digital Age project and he was also the only European winner of a Blackboard Catalyst award for his work with distance learners.

What would a synthetic theory of Digital, Media and Information Literacy (DMIL) look like? Radical Information Literacy presents, for the first time, a theory of DMIL that synthesises the diversity of perspectives and positions on DMIL, both in the classroom and the workplace, and within the informal learning processes of society. This title is based on original analysis of how decisions are made about the relevance of information and the other resources used in learning, showing how society has privileged objective approaches (used in rule-based decision making) to the detriment of subjective and intersubjective perspectives which promote individual and community contexts. The book goes on to analyse the academic and popular DMIL literature, showing how the field may have been, consciously or unwittingly, complicit in the 'objectification' of learning and the disempowerment of individuals and communities. Alternative ways of conceiving the subject are then presented, towards a reversal of these trends.