The Possibilities for “Humanizing” Posthumanist Inquiries: An Intra-Active Conversation

Abstract

What are the ethical responsibilities of doing and teaching qualitative inquiry at a time when Black and Brown bodies are under assault, an expression of White supremacy that has become ever more visible in the wake of the election of Donald Trump? And how might scholars who “think with” posthumanist theories respond to the call for more “humanizing” methodologies being made by African American and Latinx researchers? This article responds to this moment by presenting a conversation among three literacy scholars about the ethical challenges they have encountered in their own engagements with posthumanist theories, and the implications this has for doing/teaching qualitative inquiry. We call for more openness about the limits as well as the possibilities of posthumanisms, and more attention to ethics for justice. The entanglements of human/nonhuman assemblages in these dangerous times call on us to act, not only think, with theory.

Tuning into ‘fleshy’ frequencies: A posthuman mapping of affect, sound and de/colonized literacies with/in a primary classroom

“…Though this 'new' turn in literacy promises to shape our examinations of subjectivity and corporeality as relational ontologies, educational scholars have begun to critique posthumanism for failing to attend to issues of power (Dernikos et al, 2019;Nichols and Campano, 2017) and the ways that more-than-human relationalities may perpetuate coloniality (Zembylas, 2018). Juxtaposing postcolonial (Spillers, 1987;Wynter, 2003) and posthuman (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) thought, Weheliye (2014) asks, what if we did not 'take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain' (p. 8)?…”

“…While such theories vary immensely in their specific engagements, they share a commitment to reconceptualizing human beings as ‘more-than-human’ collectivities. By doing so, posthumanism challenges those legacies of humanism that seek to disavow the dynamic relations among humans, animals, machine, things, environments and so forth (Dernikos et al., 2019; Snaza and Weaver, 2015).…”

Reimagining health and fitness materials: an affective inquiry into collaging

“…I relished in the hesitancies. There are inherent power dynamics embedded in race, gender, age, culture that, even in a post-humanist inquiry, can be reified (Dernikos, Ferguson, & Siegel, 2019). In fact, as I reflect on my own re-assembling, I most likely re-produced some of these territorializing flows of affect.…”

“…Again, there is a long history of privileging certain bodies (White, heterosexual, ablebodied, fit) over others (Black/Brown, queer, disabled, fat) in PE, health, fitness and physical culture (Dagkas, 2014;Fitzpatrick, 2013;Fullagar & Pavlidis, 2018;Landi, 2018). This privileging may be more problematic as the current educational and political climate (in the U.S.) prioritizes corporatization, individualism and privatization (Strom & Martin, 2017), which further marginalize (and assault) Black/Latinx bodies (Dernikos et al, 2019). With physical culture (through PE, sports, media, after-school programming) inevitably tied to sociopolitical issues (Fullagar, 2017) and scholarship embedded in commercial networks of connection (Gard & Pluim, 2017), I can't help but emphasize ways to do research and educational practices differently.…”

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

“…Recently, the renewed attention to affect within the field of literacy (Leander & Ehret, 2019) has brought with it similar concerns, namely that literacy studies drawing upon posthuman and new materialist theories, which include theories of affect, have not adequately attended to issues of power and, as such, tend to undertheorize or overlook race and racism (Beucher et al, 2019; Dernikos et al, 2020; Nichols & Campano, 2017). Within this article, we acknowledge these critiques at the same time that we draw upon contemporary literacy scholarship on affect that has been vital to our conceptualization of affective literacies as emergent (Dutro, 2019; Leander & Boldt, 2013; Rowsell et al, 2018), material-discursive (Burnett & Merchant, 2016; Kuby et al, 2019; Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2016; Lenters, 2016; Niccolini, 2019), vibrational (Dernikos, 2020; Hackett & Somerville, 2017; Wargo, 2019), and historical—that is, where the past unexpectedly emerges within present moments to trouble the humanist conception of time as discrete and linear (Dernikos & Thiel, 2020; Grinage, 2019; Jones & Spector, 2017; Lee et al, 2020; for timescales, see Compton-Lilly, 2011; for racial hauntings, see Johnson, 2017).…”