Encounters With Writing: Becoming-With Posthumanist Ethics

Abstract

In this article, the authors (re)think writing as an ethical endeavor to explore and to cultivate more inclusive orientations for writing research and teaching. Situated in posthumanist scholarship on intra-activity, trans-corporeality, and translingual assemblages, they provide data–theory encounters that resist the privileging of alphabetic print, standardized written English approaches to writing pedagogies that have detached writers from the contextual doing/being/feeling demanded of composing-with-all-bodies. Data in the article are drawn from three separate research projects. Diffractively reading data through posthumanist theoretical concepts, the authors highlight the tensions and insights produced from their analysis to provoke an ethico-onto-epistemological shift in writing studies and classroom pedagogies, and to enliven the ethical work of exploring and cultivating more inclusive orientations to writing research and teaching.

(Re)Thinking children as fully (in)human and literacies as otherwise through (re)etymologizing intervene and inequality

“…As we share in other publications (e.g. Zapata et al, 2018), we feel this intraactive pedagogy with humans and nonhumans is an ethical project, as children should have spaces to think, learn, grow, compose with a variety of tools and supplies across many disciplines, to become fully (in)human in relational fields (subjectivity). Therefore, we are forced to view posthumanist theories not as theories simply about materialityabout adding art and digital stuff to classroom spacesrather it is a philosophical orientation to how one views the world (and the relationships that come into being)an ethico-onto-epistemological approach to pedagogy, literacies and social inequalities.…”

On the relational autonomy of materials: entanglements in maker literacies research

“…Drawing on Lenz Taguchi's (2012) diffractive methodology and Kuby's (2019) posthuman vignettes as a way to think with theory and data (Mazzei and Jackson, 2012), we present assemblages of field notes (subsections identified), images from the two research sites (image captions are left off to not interfere with flow) and interview transcripts. To do so, we espouse the tenets of posthumanism in understanding that “posthumanism is not about getting rid of humans but rather seeing them as a part of relations with non‐humans and more‐than‐humans” (Zapata et al, 2018, p. 481). These posthuman vignettes are research site specific.…”

“…This investigation is made possible by using such posthuman methodologies as a playful diffraction of the transcription of intra‐actions (Kuby, 2017a), as well as attuning to intra‐activity with materials as “the entangled intra‐actions of people, writing tools, technologies, time, space, environment, and so forth” (Kuby, 2017b, p. 885). Presenting entanglements with data allows us to attend to the relationality of materiality, language, affective moments, space, place and objects – with an acute understanding that these dimensions are weaved in together and are, therefore, inseparable (Zapata et al, 2018).…”

Red circles, embodied literacies, and neoliberalism: The art of noticing an unruly placemaking event

“…As I have explained elsewhere, policies that often locate problems in individuals tend to ignore material ramifications of political, social, and economic worldmaking and thus writing instruction [and reading instruction for that matter] often becomes about how can we fix a body rather than what can bodies do. (Zapata et al, 2018) Furthermore, in part, education has become about 'transforming "empty" spaces into industrial resource fields' (Tsing, 2015: 18). Rather than viewing children as capable, competent and creative, a capitalist market sees the bodies of children as empty spaces to be transformed into the workforce of tomorrow and they are evaluated as economic returns in early care investments (U.S. Executive Office of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, 2015).…”