Thought-Provoking ‘Contamination’: Applied Linguistics, Literacies and Posthumanism

Abstract

This paper purports to present some characteristics of the posthuman perspective and relate them to contemporary understanding of applied linguistics and literacy studies with preliminary activities in this direction and interrogations for future studies. As interdisciplinary studies, posthumanism draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage (2005) and has been gaining relevance according to theorists such as Barad (2007), Bennet (2010), Braidotti (2018) and Pennycook (2018), among others. One of their concerns is the future of language research, teaching, learning and enacting in philosophical, transcultural and educational ways. Barad (2007) and Bennet (2010)) use the terms humans and nonhumans while Braidotti (2018) and Pennycook (2018) write humans and non-humans. At times, Bennet (2010) prefers human-nonhuman(s) to emphasize the idea of assemblage. They consider such agents in vibrant interconnected assembles within a broader range of semiotic, spatial and ethical complexities in the emergence of posthuman humanism as Braidotti (2018) argues. This calls for applied linguistics and literacy studies willing to recognize that they themselves are products of such entanglements for which a revision of ontologies influencing epistemologies and methodologies might be productive.

Family literacies during the COVID-19 lockdown: Semiotic assemblages and meaning making at home

“…Because of the research team's rich experience in education and familiarity with school literacy, parents as co-researchers intentionally captured the emerging learning opportunities during the lockdown to engage children in relationship building with languages, modes, and media in specific moments and spaces. Takaki (2019) raises important questions about the affordance of posthuman applied linguistics, asking questions such as, “To what extent does a posthumanist applied linguistics favor the less prestigious social classes, their cultural capitals and histories together with the less dominant materiality in entangled ways?” (p. 595). We argue that post-pandemic literacy pedagogy and curriculum can foreground relational and ethical response-ability to the world.…”

“…Our way of noticing literacies focused on “dynamic and contingent materialization” ( Barad, 2007 , p. 224) of these spaces, timescales, and bodies, for example, how children's and parents’ embodied encounters with space, humans, modes, media, and languages in a specific moment opened (or not) lively, fluid, and multiple possibilities for meaning making. We also attended to and shared paralinguistic elements in the stories, such as bodily (e.g., gestures, mimes, and postures), affective (e.g., stress, anxiety, and fear), and sensory (e.g., seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, speaking) elements (e.g., Guerrettaz et al, 2021 ; Pennycook, 2018 ; Takaki, 2019 ). Such posthuman ways of noticing foreground the unbounded material-discursive relationships through which communities of inquiry, subjectivity, knowledge, and meaning emerge.…”

“…Our study was also oriented through posthuman ethics that were “fluid and open” to surprise ( Hargraves, 2019 , p. 191) and rejected a priori assumptions of findings, including those related to who and what would be involved in the household literacies. Posthuman scholarship, for instance, highlights human-nonhuman entanglements and pedagogical advocacy that goes beyond the “realm of the humans” ( Takaki, 2019 , p. 608). Snaza (2019) argues that all living things sign and that human meaning making emerges with the semiotic life of all life forms.…”

Language Teacher Education In Brazil: A Nexus of Narratives and Dancing From a Southern Decolonial Perspective

“…Despite being located in the borderline between Bolivia and Paraguay, the state of Mato Grosso do Sul (MS) is "monolingual" in the sense that Portuguese is rarely spoken together with other languages, which brings me to a search for decolonial options in border thinking (MIGNOLO, 2018) to valorize students' diverse forms of knowledge and relationship construction, storytelling, experiences and intercultural ways of living otherwise (WALSH, 2007. In the field of critical English language teacher education and researching, together with some colleagues 2 , I have been trying to move away from totalities through working on translanguaging, tranculturalities, identity, race, ethnicity, power relation, agency and citizenship in critical, creative and ethical (CAPUTO, 1993, TAKAKI, 2011, 2016, 2019a, 2019b ways.…”