The Lonely Letters

Refusals,Re-Turns, and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale

“…How might we learn to think and feel differently about such liveliness once we consider the myriad ways some children’s “animated” bodies become racialized, gendered, classed, and so on within educational and community spaces? And, what becomes possible for literacies and for Black and Brown children, in particular, when the porosity of bodies is paid attention to as an occasion for meditative opening, an opportunity to sense otherwise worlds enfold and unfold (Crawley, 2020)?…”

“…. of thinking again about all that was compressed” (Crawley, 2020, p. 5; emphasis added), unnoticed, when “thinking with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) this same scene in other times and spaces. Inspired by Crawley’s (2017a, 2017b, 2020) theorizing of sonic epistemologies—or feeling with blackness 1 —we position repetition as a means of staying and lingering with a data scene to imagine otherwise possibilities (Crawley, 2017a), especially for children who have been historically deprivileged by humanist conceptions of what counts as literacy and who counts as successfully literate (Snaza, 2019; Willis, 1997).…”

“…of thinking again about all that was compressed” (Crawley, 2020, p. 5; emphasis added), unnoticed, when “thinking with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) this same scene in other times and spaces. Inspired by Crawley’s (2017a, 2017b, 2020) theorizing of sonic epistemologies—or feeling with blackness 1 —we position repetition as a means of staying and lingering with a data scene to imagine otherwise possibilities (Crawley, 2017a), especially for children who have been historically deprivileged by humanist conceptions of what counts as literacy and who counts as successfully literate (Snaza, 2019; Willis, 1997). In our desire to become “undisciplined” (Sharpe, 2016), that is, to “experiment” with nontraditional research modes and methods, we align with Black and feminist scholars who, for decades, have troubled the epistemological project of Western humanism that privileges hierarchical binaries, critical distance, the “rational” mind, and the dispassionate, disembodied autonomous individual (Crawley, 2020; Dillard, 2012; Johnson, 2017; Ohito, 2019, 2020; Sharpe, 2016; St Pierre, 2011; Strom et al, 2019).…”

“…Following these scholars, we engage in an ethico-onto-epistemological process that seeks to disrupt neoliberal, colonial, heteropatriarchal, and white supremacist ways of knowing, being, and doing. We argue that this simultaneous disruption and desire to do otherwise is critical for rethinking literacy practices and inquiries, as it opens educators up to feeling the sonic—alternative space-times where other social worlds already always exist to honor, affirm, and love blackness , which here refers not only to the mattering of Black lives, but also a way of thinking↔feeling knowledge/world/subject-making beyond white settler colonialism and other anti-Black modes of existence (Crawley, 2017a, 2020). Sonic epistemologies, therefore, invite us to retheorize affect and literacy from a place that refuses the abjection of Black and other marginalized bodies from the category of the human, while simultaneously investing in otherwise ontologies.…”

“…She does so alongside an educational colleague’s response to the boys’ play as “violent.” In the second re-turn , Jaye initially thinks with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) trans-corporeality and porosity (Alaimo, 2010) to trouble her colleague’s response, but soon finds herself troubling her own theoretical entanglements. The final re-turn is a “gathering together” (Crawley, 2020) where we (Jaye and Bessie) strive to put Crawley’s concept of sonic epistemologies to work to sense the possibility for something otherwise not yet noticed—while simultaneously acknowledging the dangers and our own complicity in potentially reinscribing whiteness.…”