The literacies of things: Reconfiguring the material-discursive production of race and class in an informal learning centre

Padlocks, fences and gates

It was week one in our first summer when the Playhouse wasn’t quite the Playhouse but instead was in the changing-of-the-guard stage where one group is fumbling their way in and another is slowly tiptoeing out. I ¹ stand on the playground and walk the fence line. It has been secured with big, dangling metal chains and steel keyed locks. All the children have gone home and have no hope of reentering the playground through the traditional methods of walking through open gates. To reenter, they will need to climb up and over the chain-link fence – a feat I’ve watched them perform all week. When they are locked in, they escape over like bodies being held captive against their will. When they are locked out, they sneak in like rogues, as if they must be thieves to take what is rightfully theirs– a playground in their neighbourhood. One thing is certain, children don’t tend to let locks deter them from their ambitions.

Earlier, when the children were here, family members stood at the gates talking to their kids as if miles divided them, although only inches of galvanized metal walled them apart. The kids might jump the fence but the adults never did. When I asked the former director about the locks I was told, “We need them to keep the kids in and keep the bad people out.” A point I found rather curious considering the children lived only doors away from the playground and the only people outside of the fence line were family members and neighbours.

As I turn to leave the playground I notice a pile of freshly cut human hair clumped together on the playground side of the fence. I remembered that the family living in the house next door had cut several heads of hair that afternoon while I played with the children on this side of the fence line. Now the remains of those haircuts sat idly on the playground, which had become a dumping ground for excess that the neighbours no longer wanted in their yard. “The chains and locks,” I thought to myself, as the clump of hair demanded my attention. “There is something about these damn chains and locks.”

The chains and locks produced literacies of race, social class and ways of belonging or not belonging. The thing-power of these objects (Bennett, 2010) encouraged overtly monitoring the playground and the surveillance of bodies – black and brown working-class bodies of children and family members in the neighbourhood being monitored and surveilled by a white woman (and sanctioned by a middle-classed institution) body who was the former director. Additionally, the chains and locks fortified a criminalization of the working-class black and brown children and families living literally around the fences that were being barred, a material-discursive apparatus that produces racialized and classed literacies in the United States that have become taken for granted as commonsense. African American boys and men are incarcerated at much higher levels than any other group (Alexander, 2012) and immigrants – particularly of Mexican descent – are detained in private detention centres while awaiting a court date and facing inhumane conditions (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016), and poor people from all backgrounds are more likely to face criminalization of their everyday financially insecure lives, including the inability to pay fees, fines (American Civil Liberties Union, 2010).

Bars, chains, fences and locks are part of a broad societal material-discursive apparatus that produces literacies that make sense of black, brown, immigrant and poor humans as potentially criminal and in need of being contained or restricted; belonging or not belonging. And in the local context of the Playhouse neighbourhood, the metal objects seemed to be marking a distinction between “us” and “them” or “this place” and “that place” in a way that literally made it okay to dump one’s rubbish and hair trimmings inside the fence line where neighbourhood adults didn’t belong and didn’t participate. As Braidotti (2010) reminds us, tending to the powerful and interdependent material, discursive and symbolic forces of social and political practices can help us reimagine a more ethical way of being and doing. The fences, chains, bars and locks were not neutral objects but rather active agents in the literacies that children and adults had acquired about the place of the Playhouse and the surrounding neighbourhood.

Eventually, the chains came off that summer. It took some time and finesse, but within a few days the gates were free to swing open and the kids were free to run in and out. The playground didn’t feel as closed in – as exclusionary as Barad (2007) might say. The opening of the gates seemed to welcome the playground to the rest of the neighbourhood and vice versa. But just as it takes time to create a material-discursive apparatus, so it takes time to shift them into something different.

With the gates opened, children whirled by as they had the day before when the chains were in place, chasing each other across the playscape, stopping at the fence line on the other side of the yard as if the locks where still there. Families continued to stand on the opposite side of the fence to talk to their own children – even though the gates were open. Removal of the chains and locks, then, didn’t immediately change social practices, or the literacies (ways of being, doing, thinking in a particular place), for a while. Like the bookcases and the window-bars, the padlocks, fences and gates construct certain kinds of literacies about people, places and things, literacies that have been materially and discursively produced well beyond the Playhouse and the community of South Woods, including commercials about home invasion, home-security and terrorism, police blotters, black hoodies, the working-poor and slave narratives (the list could go on and on). Chains and locks are not simply chains and locks but rather they exert a thing-power and vital animacy that stretch well beyond the metal gates they hold shut.

Although the locks and chains were neither our rule nor a practice we considered continuing when we began spending time at the Playhouse, they were remnants of the messiness left behind even once conditions began to change. We slowly noticed new literacies emerge in everyday practices. Eventually children started using the rest of South Woods as an extension of the Playhouse and vice versa, rather than feeling forced to stay inside the fence line when on the playground. Families started coming to the Playhouse more often when we were there and now, four years later, mums, dads, grandpas, grandmas and aunts and uncles usually walk onto the playground to chat with children and us without hesitation. Indeed, different social participation practices began to emerge and we would argue that these, in many ways, were more ethical and not reproductions of unjust raced and classed literacies. However, the literacies produced by these chains continue to serve as a powerful reminder that:

Place-making for children and youth is a political act, and all educators and educational researchers are engaged in such politics. Spaces can be created to produce control, indoctrinate, colonize, and discipline young bodies/minds just as they can be created to produce and actively cultivate creativity, curiosity, and social critique. (Jones et al., 2016)

Barred windows, opening indoor spaces and literacies of possibilities

After that summer we made further material changes that we believe were significant in shifting the possibility of conditions around literacies of race, class and place.

The Playhouse was the only building/home in the entire neighbourhood that had bars on the windows, making it stand out as an exception. The bars – installed by an institution that placed itself voluntarily in the neighbourhood – echoed the same raced and classed literacies as the chains and locks on the fences. The material-discursive literacies produced by the barred windows include fear of working-class communities of colour and an assumption that certain kinds of crime will be attempted (breaking and entering, perhaps, or theft). These raced-and-classed literacies are not only acquired about the place of South Woods by outside visitors, but they are also acquired by children and families who live there themselves. Acquiring these literacies, neighbourhood residents might perceive their own community as potentially dangerous and a place to be feared, or they may resent the production of such literacies about their homes, choosing to resist institutions and the people representing them. While we have no way of knowing what, if any, role the different material-discursive apparatus of the Playhouse played in their perceptions of the neighbourhood, several adult residents over the years have said things to us like, “This used to be a dangerous neighbourhood, but it isn’t any more.”

Inside the approximately 700-square-foot home that was now the Playhouse, there were two rooms that had previously been reserved for adult administrative work and a restricted computer lab. Children rarely got a glimpse of the office, which gave it great weight in the children’s lives, nourishing a power relationship between the room and the bodies of children who were unable to use it. The computer lab produced the same kinds of tensions because it was a space that could only be used at certain times and only under direct adult supervision, and both rooms were locked with metal padlocks at all times. Building off the interests of the children over the summer, we transformed both rooms into spaces to create and design. The office became a room that was used for construction where a built-in desk became a work table to tinker with materials and the filing cabinet was replaced with a cart with natural wood blocks (see Figure 2). The closet that once served as a place for files and office supplies became shelves full of loose parts (Nicholson, 1972) to make with (boxes, corks, lids etc.). OPEN IN VIEWER

The door to the cupboard that had also been locked with a padlock was removed completely to open up access to children at all times and a way of adults and children belonging in the space in a more egalitarian way. Making these two rooms accessible to everyone shifted the centres of production to reform subjectivities (Barad, 2007), it literally changed whom we could be in our intra-actions with other humans and non-humans in these spaces, producing new literacies as a result. Liz Jones (2013) writes:

The classroom becomes part of a violent confrontation, a context of simultaneous space and event, where bodies violate spaces and spaces violate bodies a series of complex relational politics within the space the classroom creates and the activities it embodies. (p. 605)

In addition to these two rooms, design was reconfigured to add an overall softness and provide the centre with fluid and relational aesthetics (Ceppi and Zini, 2003). These elements were an important commitment to providing a space that welcomed freedom to explore and move from place-to-place without feeling confined to one area in the Playhouse (see Figure 3) and simultaneously were meant to encourage creative endeavours (i.e. removing some of the bookcases that took up most of the floor space in the library). Spaces that once looked like the one in Figure 2 became spaces like the one in Figure 3. Aware of the impact of economic, political and social forces on community centres like this one, it was also important that the children were invited to access the Playhouse on their own time and in their own ways. Redesigning the Playhouse as a makerspace, we wanted to ensure more fluidity and accessibility by being free of charge. The national programme running the centre before us charged fees to attend, and sometimes even families that lived next door to the community centre were unable to use the Playhouse. In the United States, accessibility to afterschool programmes is often mired in who has the various resources to send their children (money, transportation, schedule, English language reading and writing literacies), limiting possibilities for families like the ones in South Woods. Furthermore, makerspaces are often costly and found within more affluent spaces. Afterschool centres that focus on creativity and special interest classes are rarely accessible to working class children and children of Colour. OPEN IN VIEWER

Additionally, without adhering to strict schedules and rules, children were invited to access space and materials on their own time. No one at the community centre was forced to complete homework but they could receive homework help if they chose to do so. No one had to check children in and out each day, but all family members were welcome at any time. Bodies were free to come and go as they wanted – a social and political practice and way of belonging in the community that was already embedded in the neighbourhood literacies “outside” the Playhouse fences, but not integrated inside the neighbourhood Playhouse.

Once the Playhouse reopened, the newly designed space produced its own set of literacies – some new and some old. While the space and the materials within it produced affects that emerged as power for young people to make-design-invent, so also did they emerge as power to destruct. For the first few weeks after these radical changes in the material-discursive apparatus, children were a bit rougher and louder in these spaces, particularly the spaces where they weren’t allowed in the past (the former office and computer lab, for example). It was as if they were telling the space, “You belong to us now.”

Unlike the subtle and slow-changing social practices around the absence of chains and locks outside, the transformations in the indoor rooms were bold and blatant. Children would stand just outside the former office, peek at it around the corner, and then hurl their bodies onto the rug, rolling around and kicking while laughing loudly. As their young bodies entangled with the bodies of objects in the rooms, the children wanted to make sure the space knew they were there. Sometimes blocks went flying, forte singing reverberated, and paint splattered windows, walls and doors. At other times, objects were used feverishly and in bulk to feed what seemed like an insatiable need to crumple and discard materials. Could it be that the young people were wielding their power to dominate the materiality of the space like it had dominated them for so many years? We worked through these power dynamics by adding noise absorbing elements such as rugs and curtains, and we had conversations with children reassuring them that the rooms and the materials would continue to be available when the building was open, negotiating the ways we all wanted to take care of these areas with responsibility and accountability to the space and people and materials within it – acquiring new literacies of place through our intra-actions with it.

We do not intend to romanticize the messy and difficult work of place-making and the intention to create material-discursive apparatuses that produce more open and just literacies, but with time, the material and discursive productions of bodies shifted (and continue to do so). Rooms began to produce creativity rather than exclusion and domination. Like the bookcases, the art supplies, books, building materials all became part of a different kind of pedagogy, one that seemed to push back at “the confining space of existing cultural models and vocabulary of teaching, learning, and curriculum” (Burdick and Sandlin, 2010: 339). Bodies of paper, fabric, boxes and children co-produced in powerful ways. Like the bookcases, material objects became more than their predetermined socially constructed use: fabric and pipe cleaners became the tools of a superhero (see Figure 4) and paper became spinners (see Figure 5) producing new expressions of language and literacy desirings (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker, 2016), as well as constructing different conditions of possibilities for humans and nonhumans alike. OPEN IN VIEWER

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Paper becomes spinners.

The vibrant thing-power of objects, space and children reconfigured literacies of race and class, narrating young black and brown children in a working-class community experiencing tremendous economic challenges as creative and intellectual makers at the Playhouse. Furthermore, issues of accessibility always involve the more-than-human, particularly since the things that are typically being accessed are nonhuman themselves. Access always has and always will be about the power of things, further illustrating the necessity of paying attention to the powerful literacies that vibrant matter exerts.