1st Edition
Posthumanism and Literacy Education Knowing/Becoming/Doing Literacies
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.
Preface: Overview of Chapters and (Un)Structure of Book
Candace R. Kuby, Karen Spector, and Jaye Johnson Thiel
Cuts Too Small: An Introduction
Candace R. Kuby, Karen Spector, and Jaye Johnson Thiel
Part 1: Agency
Jaye Johnson Thiel, Candace R. Kuby, and Karen Spector
Chapter 1. Threads and Fingerprints: Diffractive Writings and Readings of Place
Teri Holbrook and Susan Ophelia Cannon
Chapter 2. A Thebuwa Hauntology, From Silence to Speech: Reconfiguring Literacy Practices
Denise Newfield and Vivienne Bozalek
Chapter 3. Careful! There Are Monsters in This Chapter: Posthuman Ethical Considerations in Literacy Practice
Jaye Johnson Thiel and Candace R. Kuby
Diffracting: The Ungraspable In-Between of Posthuman Literacies
Karen Spector and Briana G. Kidd
Part 2: Intra-Action and Entanglement
Candace R. Kuby, Jaye Johnson Thiel, and Karen Spector
Chapter 4. The Untimely Death of a Bird: A Posthuman Tale
Christopher M. Schulte
Chapter 5. Reading Acts: Books, Activisms, and an Autopoietic Politics
Alyssa D. Niccolini
Chapter 6. Étienne Souriau and Educational Literacy Research as an Instaurative Event
Petra Mikulan
Diffracting: Human Limbs, Dead Birds, Active Books, and Bucking Horses: The Work to-be-Made of Literacies in the Present
Stephanie Jones
Monster Mutation: The First Mutation: Sliding Into Summer
Jaye Johnson Thiel
Part 3: Subjectivity
Karen Spector, Candace R. Kuby, and Jaye Johnson Thiel
Chapter 7. Lives, Lines, and Spacetimemattering: An Intra-Active Analysis of a ‘Once OK’ Adult Writer
Jon M. Wargo
Chapter 8. Collage Pedagogy: Toward a Posthuman Racial Literacy
Asilia Franklin-Phipps and Courtney L. Rath
Chapter 9. Choosing a Picturebook as Provocation in Teacher Education: The ‘Posthuman Family’
Karin Murris
Diffracting: Posthuman Literacies in a Minor Language: Expressions-to-Come
Lisa A. Mazzei and Alecia Y. Jackson
Monster Mutation The Second Mutation: The Workshop Approach for Reading and Writing Instruction
Candace R. Kuby
Part 4: Affect
Karen Spector, Jaye Johnson Thiel, and Candace R. Kuby
Chapter 10. The Posthuman Condition of Ethics in Early Childhood Literacy: Order-in(g) Be(e)ing Literacy
Vicki Hargraves
Chapter 11. Encountering Waste Landscapes: More-Than-Human Place Literacies in Early Childhood Education
Fikile Nxumalo and Jessica Cira Rubin
Chapter 12. Abductions
Karen Spector and Kelly W. Guyotte
Diffracting: Theory That Cats Have About Swift Louseflies: A Distractive Response
Pauliina Rautio
Monster Mutation: The Third Mutation: An Invitation of Being-With Monsters, Care-fully, Response-ably
Jaye Johnson Thiel and Candace R. Kuby
Biography
Candace R. Kuby is Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Missouri, USA.
Karen Spector is Associate Professor of Secondary Education Language Arts at the University of Alabama, USA.
Jaye Johnson Thiel is a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Georgia, USA.
"This ‘full throated appeal to intra-act with posthumanist ideas’ moves bodies, shifts ideas, and unsettles assumptions. Thinking literacy education, together with critical, decolonial, Indigenous and feminist new materialist scholarship, highlights the violence of making ‘cuts too small’ when it comes to how we consider literacy practices, and cuts that exclude and marginalise. This collection invites us to imagine and speculate on what knowing/being/doing literacies are or could be."
--Abigail Hackett, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
"This book is fascinating—each chapter is compelling and challenges the reader to consider what it means to live, learn and be/become literate. Constructed with great care, critical concepts from post humanist thinking are given deep consideration and then playfully remixed through diffractive composings and monstrous mutations."
--Pam Whitty, University of New Brunswick, Canada