Posthumanism and Literacy Education

Knowing/Becoming/Doing Literacies

Candace Kuby, Karen Spector, Jaye Johnson Thiel, Candace R. Kuby, Karen Spector, Jaye Johnson Thiel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351603089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Covering key terms and concepts in the emerging field of posthumanism and literacy education, this volume investigates posthumanism, not as a lofty theory, but as a materialized way of knowing/becoming/doing the world. The contributors explore the ways that posthumanism helps educators better understand how students, families, and communities come to know/become/do literacies with other humans and nonhumans. Illustrative examples show how posthumanist theories are put to work in and out of school spaces as pedagogies and methodologies in literacy education. With contributions from a range of scholars, from emerging to established, and from both U.S. and international settings, the volume covers literacy practices from pre-K to adult literacy across various contexts. Chapter authors not only wrestle with methodological tensions in doing posthumanist research, but also situate it within pedagogies of teaching literacies. Inviting readers to pause, slow down, and consider posthumanist ways of thinking about agency, intra-activity, subjectivity, and affect, this book explores and experiments with new ways of seeing, understanding, and defining literacies, and allows readers to experience and intra-act with the book in ways more traditional (re)presentations do not.

Part I

Agency

Jaye Johnson Thiel, Candace R. Kuby, and Karen Spector

In these part openers, we briefly discuss one key concept in posthumanist scholarship. We define each concept and connect it to literacy education, inviting readers to think with it in the following section. However, it is important to note that we see these terms inextricably intertwined, co-constitutive of one another, and relevant to all chapters in this volume. Rather than hard-fast definitions, each term bleeds and washes into the other, creating tide pools within intertidal zones.

Most of us understand agency from a humanist perspective. Humans do things (to other humans, to systems, to materials) to make change in the world. And although some methodological paradigms give a nod to nonhuman material (e.g., critical geographies, cultural-historical activity theory, mediated discourse analysis, actor-network theory, etc.), agency is typically produced subjectively and the human (subject) is outside of the other or thing (object). As described in the introduction, posthumanism challenges the subject/object, nature/culture binaries, and in doing so we not only have to rethink subjectivity but also agency. For Barad (2007), “agency is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit and is no longer aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity” (p. 177). Do we have to get rid of the term “agency,” since it is so entangled with humanist assumptions, and create new language for describing the materialdiscursive unfolding of the world?

One of the most poignant examples of posthumanist agency is of a girl/sand/sandbox/tools coming into play with each other. Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) write a lengthy description of a preschool girl in a sandbox. Most people would say the girl is playing with the sand, a humanist orientation as the sand and tools are passive; however, the authors help us understand how “‘agency’ in a relational materialist approach is a quality that emerges in-between different bodies involved in mutual engagements and relations” (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 530). Therefore, the girl isn’t playing with the sand, nor is the sand playing with the girl—this sets up a binary of subject/object. Instead the play is happening in the intra-action as they come into play together. Both the girl and the sand are becoming with each other. Both the child and the materials are active agents together in the becoming of knowledges, realities, and relationships (ethico-onto-epistemology).

The term “enacted agency” is used in posthumanism to signal all the actants (i.e., human, nonhuman, more-than-human) produce agency together in their intra-action(s). As Barad (2007) writes,

Agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has … Agency is “doing” or “being” in its intra-activity … Agency is about changing possibilities of change entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production.

(p. 178)

Therefore, “actants” do not pre-exist each other but come into being through intra-actions that change the possibilities of reconfiguring the world. Enacted agency helps us see the potential, the hopefulness (but not only hopefulness) of entangled matter mattering—now, not in a future, but in the moment, in today’s entanglements. This sense of urgency, of nowness, is critical in producing change in literacy education, in schools, in children’s entangled lives. Barad expounds on this idea of enacted agency further in an interview with Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012):

First of all, agency is about response-ability, about the possibilities of mutual response, which is not to deny, but to attend to power imbalances. Agency is about possibilities for worldly re-configurings. So agency is not something possessed by humans, or non-humans for that matter. It is an enactment. And it enlists, if you will, “non-humans” as well as “humans.”

(p. 55)

How do we pay attention and recognize the enlisting of humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans in literacy education? In the classrooms and out of school spaces that we research? How might we, as a part of these assemblages, mutually respond? Be a part of re-configuring the world? Literacy education?

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.

Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525–542. doi:10.1080/09518398.2010.500628

1

Threads and Fingerprints

Diffractive Writings and Readings of Place

Teri Holbrook and Susan Ophelia Cannon

Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns, and remembers.

(Barad in Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 59)

Just the dress might have been enough for me. That was the one thing amongst the rest that called out. That drew me in. Laid out behind glass, dirty and ripped, and beautiful in its imperfections; and the text. Here the text mattered, she had made it herself.

(Susan’s journal entry, upon a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum)

Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005) writes of “anomalous places of learning,”¹ those “peculiar, irregular, abnormal, or difficult to classify” (p. 5) locations that disturb taken-for-granted understandings of knowledge, knowledge production, and educational practices. In this category she includes examples of performance art, memorials, and architectural sites. She posits that in such spaces learning bodies “fray” and identities become undone (p. 70).

Kayla Meghan Mike. Teen names written in dust on the window. I stop, arrested. Words where there should be no words, words where there should be transparency. Subtractive graffiti—grime removed, not ink applied. Does that make Kayla Meghan Mike outlaws? No one looking, my finger presses into glass and mixes skin, oil, and dirt. My cells are there now—cells within cells.

(Teri’s journal entry, upon a visit to Eastern State Penitentiary, a historical site)

In this chapter the authors, Teri and Susan (self) consciously take up notions of learning bodies engaged in trans-material fraying. Specifically, we consider the relations between bodies and buildings tasked with education and remembrance (e.g., museums, memorials, historical sites), the types of places where people are invited to undertake a hoped-for remaking. This work responds in part to ideas that buildings are texts that impart meanings (Whyte, 2006) and thereby constitute a facet of literacy. To that end, we take up how spaces can be anomalous learning sites and consider the intra-action and entanglements they involve (Barad, 2003). In intra-action with our thinking on buildings and remembrance, we ponder the materiality of texts, the boundaries of margins and gutters and other cuts, and imagine what might happen if we could take quantum scissors (Barad, 2014) to the page. (See Barad quote, p. 30.)

For this thinking, we draw from three scholarly currents: posthumanist theories (e.g., Barad, 2007), notions of embodied learning as posited by Châtelet (2000) and de Freitas and Sinclair (2014), and writings of/in textual materiality (e.g., Goldsmith, 2011; Hayles, 2004).

Several interrelated questions animate this work: How do humans/spaces intra-act as entanglements productive of learning and joy but also of sorrow and remembrance? How can/do we glimpse partial truths and engage in embodied gesturing as a way to become emotionally and materially entangled? And how might textual performativity make evident the fiction of textual immateriality (Hayles, 2004) and speak to Karen Barad’s (2003) lament/accusation that “language has been granted too much power” (p. 801)? (See Barad quote, p. 29, and Hayles quote, p. 30.)

Sorrow and Remembrance: Spaces of Entanglement

In her keynote for the 2017 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Susan Finley played Craig Santos Perez’s (2016) poem, Detour of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument, questioning who and what is remembered—and forgotten—in the production of memorial sites. In his poem, Perez wondered what would happen if visitors who remember Pearl Harbor as a battleground knew more of the site’s history and people—if they understood that the violence and loss enacted on the region extended both before and after December 7, 1941, to include acts of colonialism and the erasure of cultures and ecosystems.

What if tourists praised

Ka’ahupahau who, in the form of a shark, protected

the harbor for generations? What if they recognized

the reciprocity between sugar profits, white men,

and the sharpened edge of a bayonet constitution?

(Perez, 2016)

In discussing atrocities memorialized in poetry, Carolyn Forché (1993) writes, “It becomes easier to forget than to remember, and this forgetfulness becomes our defense against remembering—a rejection of unnecessary sentimentality, a hardheaded acceptance of ‘reality’” (p. 32). Places of remembrance and sorrow are difficult spaces, designed to invite remembrance, to forestall forgetfulness, and to install a reality. Yet there is more. Perez (2016) points to what gets washed out with remembrance, an unremembering that remembrance enacts, the entanglement that memorial sites both amplify and elide.

That buildings and memorials can be read, that they are multidimensional texts which organize space and convey meaning, is a durable thread in architectural analysis. Whyte (2006) describes how architectural scholars take up questions of buildings and meaning: some argue for a metaphorical “reading” of the built environment (e.g., cathedrals “read” for themes of faith), while others maintain that architecture employs a literal grammar that can be taught to architects for encoding and to users for decoding (e.g., Hershberger, 1988).

Moving beyond buildings as texts with stable meaning, Ellsworth (2005) draws from Grosz and Eisenman to note that bodies in built environments are part of a responsive mind/brain/body/building assemblage in which “living bodies take up and lay down space by their continuous, unfolding movement.” In this way, mind/brain/body/building assemblages engender “affect and sensation [that] are material” (p. 4, emphasis in original).

Ellsworth (2005) stretches this notion (of bodies moving through built space in constant production of material sensations) to consider how buildings are designed with pedagogical intent as sites where bodies “encounter” (p. 7) constructs of knowledge. Among these educationally conceptualized buildings are what she terms “anomalous places of learning,” locations imagined and designed outside of normative explanations of knowledge, learning, and related measurements (p. 5). These anomalous spaces anticipate visitors with edges that “fray” (p. 70), identities that “smudge” (p. 122), and bodies that are “blurred by [their] own indeterminacy” (p. 122). This fraying works against the assertion that there ever was a stable humanist self; frayed edges belie a whole cloth and instead show the self as open, unraveling, with endless unfolding surfaces for encounters, sensations, and touch.

According to Ellsworth (2005), such pedagogical spaces spur “learning selves in motion” (p. 125)—bodies that are not fixed entities waiting to receive knowledge as a dead “thing made” but that are alive with forces as “things in the making” (Rajchman as cited in Ellsworth, p. 1). Visitors may approach such sites with a sense of self as hemmed, bound, warp-and-weft woven and tacked tight, but in relation to the space and all the elements involved with it, they move to an awareness ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Overview of Chapters and (Un)Structure of Book
• Acknowledgements
• Cuts Too Small: An Introduction
• Part I Agency
• Part II Intra-Action and Entanglement
• Part III Subjectivity
• Part IV Affect
• Contributor Biographies
• Index