Abstract
Consciously or not, we educators and educational researchers are used to looking at schools as places where humans dwell together to learn what it means to be human and to accumulate the kinds of skills and habits required to participate in human societies as adults. This occurs in spite of the fact that schools are connected with the nonhuman world in so many explicit and implicit ways…we are not the center of the universe. Indeed, we should not be the center of conversation.
(Snaza et al., 2014: 39–40)
Snaza et al. make the claim that the focus of educational research has indeed, for too long, focused on humans. We agree. However, there is a material turn in the wider social science research community that is thinking about ways humans, nonhumans and more-than-humans are already always entangled in producing truths, realities, knowledges and relationships, and we would add literacies. This posthumanist movement is referred to by several names, each with distinct yet overlapping features and histories, such as feminist materialism (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2003, 2007), new materialism (Braidotti, 2013; Coole and Frost, 2010), political ecology (Bennett, 2010) and animal studies (Wolfe, 2003). This way of being/doing/knowing in the world isn’t new, as many Indigenous peoples have always understood and known this (Tuck, 2015; Wall Kimmerer, 2013). And yet, in literacy education, there is little scholarship that explicitly wrestles with posthumanist ideas. This is the aim of the special issue, to intentionally create cracks, fissures, to open up conversations on posthumanism in literacy education. However, we are not naive, as Taylor (2016) writes: “Doing posthumanist research in education is a challenge…Posthumanism proposes different starting points for educational research and new ways of grasping educational experience than those afforded by humanism” (p. 5). As we have read and wrestled with posthumanist philosophies, we have come to see posthumanism as a paradigmatically different way of thinking about knowing (epistemology), being (ontology) and doing (axiology). As Barad (2007) writes, knowing and being cannot be separated and therefore she proposes, along with Lenz Taguchi (2010), an ethico-onto-epistemological approach to research, teaching and learning. But how one goes about this is another question that demands us to read, think, read, think and become differently in our entanglements with the material world as researchers and/or teachers.
Our vision for this special issue is to provide a diverse set of articles, from international scholars (both emerging and established), to help early literacy educators imagine possibilities for posthumanist theories as pedagogy(ies) and methodology(ies). We invited the authors to consider these questions as inspiration:
How has posthumanist theory influenced your teaching ←→ learning of literacies with young children? What tensions and possibilities of are involved in putting this theory to work as pedagogy? How has posthumanist theory shaped your research methodologies (i.e. data production, transcription, data analysis and writing up of research)? What are the tensions and possibilities of putting this theory to work as methodology? What do early childhood literacy educators need to think about as social science research moves beyond a linguistic turn to a material turn? What are the ethics of doing (living out) posthumanist theory? Why is a posthumanist view of early literacy education needed?
We are delighted with the nine articles featured in this special issue—as they are diverse and unique—yet all provoke our thinking and push us to consider new ways of thinking about literacies. We are thrilled to see what newness might emerge for you (for the field) as you entangle with these manuscripts!
We suspect as you read these pieces there will places of confusion, of disagreement, of inspiration. Embrace them all. We realize that when with newness it can feel uncomfortable and exciting at the same time. We are inspired by Snaza et al. (2014), citing Cary Wolfe, who writes: “We need a new political vocabulary that will open politics to nonhuman subjects, which also necessarily entails opening politics to those who have been considered ‘less than human’ by modern imperialist states” (p. 42). We are energized and hopeful in “this ‘new’ way of thinking, which is only new in the sense that it puts humans back into the thick ontological and political relations in which they have always already been networked, [it] is going to necessitate wide-ranging and radical changes in how we conceive of educational practices and institutions” (Snaza et al., 2014: 43). So, how might your thinking/being/doing as a literacy educator radically change?
We believe this work is centrally grounded in a new ethics for literacy educators. Taylor (2016) sees posthumanism as “A new ethics of engagement for education by including the nonhuman in questions about who matters and what counts in questioning the constitutive role played by humanist dominant paradigms, methodologies, and methods in working as actualizers of normative procedures” (pp. 5–6, emphasis in original). And with new ethics come new ways of doing (methodologically) this work. Posthumanist research is not a “stir and mix in” approach, where one reads a posthumanist theory and “applies” it with conventional humanist approaches to research methods (St. Pierre, 2011, 2014, 2015). It is instead an ethico-onto-epistemological paradigmatic shift. Taylor (2016) writes, “Posthumanist research is an enactment of knowing-in-being that emerges in the event of doing research itself” (p. 18). Therefore, there isn’t a pre-set research design with predetermined questions and methods of analysis. Instead, researchers think. Think with theories and matter in the world (i.e. students, schools, teachers, writing, books, art supplies, plants, digital tools and so forth) in order to create a new (theories, literacies, methodologies, and … and … and …). Inspiration comes from Deleuze and Guattari (1994) who claim that “to think is to experiment” (p. 111). Deleuze and Guattari also write about thinking as an encounter with the outside and as engaging with the unthought. The authors in this special issue have done just that: thought, experimented, encountered outside worlds (in which we are all already entangled) and engaged with the unthought. We invite you to do likewise.
“Social” justice, race, economic inequities, ethics and power
It is not uncommon at conferences, when Candace presents on posthumanist literacies, to get questions such as: “Where is the ‘critical’ in this work (critical theories)?” or “What about power?” or “What about social justice and issues of race and/or economic inequities?” It seems the field of literacy education is wondering about these questions, and rightly so, after years of dedicating much of our work to these questions in relation to critical social theories. However, Latour (2004) writes that perhaps critique has run out of steam and he asks us to consider what has become of the critical spirit. Even after decades of working to enact socially just literacy curricula, schools, children and families, are still marginalized and framed in both deficit language and/or approaches to pedagogy. This critical work is on making the future better for families and yet one might argue this hasn’t happened for many of the children we work with. So what might a posthumanist perspective have to offer?
Posthumanism is rooted in a relational ontology, meaning we (humans, nonhumans and more-than-humans) are all always already entangled with each other in becoming, in making, in creating realities (the world). It is about the now, not solely about a future to come. It is about the in-the-moment realities of literacy learnings that happen today—the current realities of our students. Or as Barad (2013) writes of spacetimemattering—space and time cannot be separated from matter and the past/present/future are all already entangled. How might we think of the entanglements of children, teachers, books, digital tools, communities, families, languages and so forth intra-actively producing something differently in/with/for the world, today? Or new ways of being/knowing/doing literacies? How might these changes produce (effects) new and different relationalities? Different affectual ways of being?
Sara Ahmed (2015) writes about emotion, bodily sensations and individuals. Ahmed speaks of an “aboutness” of emotions, which involves a stance on the world, or a way of comprehending the world. Emotions pertain to human and nonhuman dimensions of life. There are histories in place before someone encounters a human and nonhuman “object” (or some might say subject), so emotions and feelings are not in the object but rather produced in-between. In this way, Ahmed analyzes what she calls “the sociality of objects”— that is, how an object works-with-us and the verb that Ahmed uses to describe this is “sticks” to/with/between us. Throughout the special issue, there are an abundance of sticky emotions binding people, things, moods and contexts, and this stickiness plays a key role in illustrating the dynamic coupling of literacy and posthumanism.
Scholars working within a material turn perspective question and write about the ethics and justice of this work in different ways: Springgay (2015) discusses relationality and ecologies of encounter, Taylor (2016) ethics of mutual relation, and Murris (2016) ontoepistemic (in)justice. Kuby and Crawford (in press) question what is “social” anymore when working within a posthumanist paradigm? Social is so laden with humanist assumptions. But how might “social justice” be thought otherwise when de-centering the human (not getting rid of human, but considering human in relations with nonhumans and more-than-humans)? As Bennett (2010) suggests, “The ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating” (p. 37). Therefore, posthumanist literacy education beckons that we rethink taken-for-granted terms such as social, justice, power, agency, subjectivity and ethics—to reimagine what these might mean and do in a material turn. What assemblages do you find yourself participating in/with/for? What is your response?
Posthumanist scholars have paved the way in this rethinking, as Karen Barad discusses in an interview with Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012), “Agency is about response-ability, about the possibilities of mutual response, which is not to deny, but to attend to the power imbalances. Agency is about possibilities for worldly re-configurings” (p. 55). Agency as in-between humans and nonhumans as worldly re-configuring—what might this mean and provoke for early literacy? Or as Barad states, “Ethics and justice are at the core of my concerns or rather, it runs through ‘my’ very being, all being. Again, for me, ethics is not a concern we add to the questions of matter, but rather is the very nature of what it means to matter” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012: 70). How does this view of ethics and justice provoke new ways of being/doing/knowing literacies? Of researching? Of teaching?
In this special issue, authors think about the possibilities of ethics and justice in posthumanism. For example, Bridges-Rhoads and Van Cleave open their manuscript in this way: The leveled books are killing me. My son comes home from school making statements like, “I’m a K.” He shows me the little round sticker on the back of his book—the one that marks the level of the book and apparently him as well. “I’m a K.” The other day, he accidentally picked up a J at school because he looked in the “wrong” box. He didn’t want to read it. He’s past that; he’s a K. I can’t help worrying and wondering about this little sticker, in this literacy learning assemblage.
Thiel and Jones are explicit in their writing about race and class in relation to posthumanism, specifically they state, “We build upon the idea that what we come to know about race and class are literacies we acquire through our material-discursive intra-actions in specific spaces.” They focus on the literacies of things in an out-of-school learning space: a bookcase, padlocks, fences, gates and barred windows as spaces and literacies of possibilities to help us see how race and class intra-act with everyday materials and literacies.
Boldt and Leander, draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the break work with a child playing with Lego and his father. They posit the idea of “moving with” as a method for research and teaching, as a method by which the break becomes possible, immanent. They write, “our focus on the break in children’s play (rather than, say, a classroom literacy event) is strategic and political”. Focusing on moving-with children, materials and play is an ethical decision and has potential for thinking/doing/teaching/learning literacies in new, just ways.
Wohlwend, Peppler, Keune, and Thompson demonstrate the afforandances and constraints of mediated discourse analysis in relation to putting to work Barad’s theory of agential realism as a method of analysis. They ask us to consider, “What do we miss if we do not look for non-representational experience and unpack the free-wheeling nonsense in children’s play and making?” They remind us that our decisions as researchers (and teachers) to attend to representational logics, humans and talk are ethical, political decisions that produce a certain narrative and view of classroom (and out-of-school) spaces and literacies.
Hermansson and Saar, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on nomadic spaces and ways of being, help us to think of writing differently. They posit: Understanding writing as nomadic does not only involve questioning dichotomies, such as beginner/advanced writer or good/bad speller, process/product or reproductive/creative writing, but also means a shift from privileging the sovereignty of the writer to acknowledging the complexity and dynamics of a writing event. Writers are thus conceptualized as emergent in a relational field instead of being autonomous subjects at the centre of experience, learning and knowledge.
Kuby, Gutshall Rucker and Darolia focus on agency in a posthuman stance. Moving away from a human-centric gaze on teaching and learning, they take a granular look at how Katie constructs a three-dimensional cabin to bring her audience into her experiences in national parks with her family. As they articulate it: “From a posthumanist stance agency is defined as an enactment between humans and nonhumans (not agency in the human or the nonhuman, this creates a binary). Enacted agency is a force emerging between people and materials, not residing solely in individuals.” This is an important distinction that compels researchers to have a fuller and more robust account of how the world forces us to think beyond human-centred notions.
So while each of these authors does not situate their articles in traditional critical social theories of justice, power, ethics, economic inequities and so forth, they each wrestle with these ideas (and perhaps redefine them) when thinking with posthumanist theories.
Locations, histories and spaces
Our special issue features authors from around the world who anchor their research in places and contexts. From Australia to America to Canada to Sweden and to the United Kingdom, there are varied landscapes that illustrate diverse entanglements of the human and nonhuman. Thinking about these studies as place-based, Prinsloo (2005) talks about digital media and objects as placed resources and he uses this term to explain how people improvise with technologies in novel ways. Locating his work within issues of race and social class, Prinsloo demonstrates how African children from middle-class backgrounds absorb the cultural capital that comes with having unlimited broadband compared with children from poorer families who make do with Internet-connected mobile phones, but how they are cut off from global resources and information that their peers have. Such work relates to articles in this special issue because authors locate their studies within places and explore the entanglements of people and objects within these contexts. However, within posthumanist traditions we are reminded of the mutually constitutive relationship of materials and discourses. Barad (2003) writes about material←→ discursive relationships: Discourse is not a synonym for language. Discourse does not refer to linguistic or signifying systems, grammars, speech acts, or conversations. To think of discourse as mere spoken or written words forming descriptive statements is to enact the mistake of representationalist thinking. Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements. Statements are not the mere utterances of the originating consciousness of a unified subject; rather, statements and subjects emerge from a field of possibilities. This field of possibilities is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity. (p. 819)
For example, in this special issue, Hackett and Somerville invite the reader to think about how to situate children’s literacies within movement and sound as world-forming practices—in museums and in the everyday car ride. They speak of vibrational properties of such modalities as sounds that are under-researched and that have a way of decentring humans in powerful ways. As they say, “For us, posthuman readings of early childhood literacy offer the possibility to shift the narrative, to reconceptualise emergent literacy in ways that reconcile with young children’s being in the world.” There are material, immaterial, physical and somatic interrelational flows around us and Hackett and Somerville open up these forces and ask us to think about how they make us rethink early childhood learning.
Harwood and Collier draw on common worlds and posthuman approaches to think about the indivisible worlds that humans, materials, nonhumans and places specifically inhabit in a forest. Contemplating what we might learn if educators, children and researchers think with objects like sticks, they illustrate the ways in which the stick coexists and intra-acts with children’s bodies, relations, identities and discourses. They claim that “A posthumanist lens opens the possibility for re-storying our understanding of matter, and how matter acts in relation with children’s play. Playful literacies in the woods with sticks are and were constantly in flux.” Their article inducts the reader into a magical world of a forest populated by human and nonhuman forces with capacities to teach in rich and varied ways.
Wargo opens up readers to sonic worlds in a classroom, highlighting how particular actions of emergent listening generate new forms of embodied knowledge-in-motion. He encourages educators to consider the modal affordances of sound and sonic composition and how emergent listening opens up pedagogical spaces where creative energies are generated and mobilized to bring to fruition an ethico-onto-epistemological world view. Wargo poses questions for us all to ponder, “As educators, we would do well to ask ourselves, what would be heard if we took seriously the potential for young children writing/making/being with sound? What pedagogical tensions are amplified through composing with sound that other modes may silence?”
Returning to Thiel and Jones as discussed above in relation to race and class, they argue that in addition to place-making being a political act, they believe that all places are profoundly pedagogical. We find hope in posthumanist theories that acknowledge and push us to consider place not as static or even as culturally and/or socially constructed, but as an active agent in intra-acting with people, digital tools and nonhumans (such as sticks in the woods, a bookcase, museum materials) to produce new ways of knowing/being/doing literacies.
How are you being response-able in your entanglements?
As the opening quote to this preface notes, for so long in education our gazes have been fixed upon humans and their pedagogical experiences. As Snaza et al. (2014) acknowledge, posthumanism represents “A common ground in directly challenging the ways humanism has restricted politics and education” (p. 41). Recognizing the entangled, intra-actions of humans with nonhumans allows for the heterogeneous realities that Deleuze and Guattari (2004) talk about and that are manifested across this special issue. In what ways might we “un-restrict” politics and education if we decentre our gaze on the human in literacy education?
As co-editors, we still struggle with how white and middle-class posthumanism can feel. Even though there are scholars of colour doing posthumanist work, we acknowledge that most contributors to this special issue are white, yet from several countries and ethnicities. Perhaps the ethics and justice of the larger body of scholarship in the material turn have not, when thought about in education, made explicit the worldly reconfiguring and new, ethical and just ways of being/doing/knowing. Our readings of many feminist “new” materialists, Indigenous scholars, political ecologists, animal studies professors and others who might be a part of the posthumanist umbrella are deeply committed to issues of power, race, ethnicity, gender and other ways people (and nonhumans) have been (and still are) marginalized. We asked ourselves and contributors to this special issue, can posthumanism in literacy studies serve activist purposes? If so, what might this look like? How might activism be rethought? There are some answers to these questions in this special issue and some remain unanswered—they are primed for other scholars and researchers (you) to explore. We leave you with a quote by Taylor (2016) which takes up this notion of an activist stance: Thinking posthuman ethics, therefore, begins by re-thinking interdependence, by including nonhumans in an ethics of care, by understanding the human always and only in-relation-to nonhumans who are no longer ‘others’ but are, intimately and always, ourselves as the body multiple. (p. 15)
Words of appreciation
On a final note, we are so grateful to Tara Gutshall Rucker for sharing her thoughts on the early stages of this special issue and for opening up her inspiring classroom to the reader. We also thank Dr Chelsey Hauge for her hard work and skillful shepherding of the special issue. You were both invaluable editorial assistants! Many thanks to the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy editorial board for offering us the space in a special issue to provide fissures and cracks in the field by considering posthumanist theories and early literacy. Specifically, Jackie Marsh, thank you for your support, expertise and answers to our many enquiries. Cristina Molina-Hall, you were our contact person with JECL; you provided so much support with the online system and the details of bringing this special issue to fruition. Thanks for your patience and guidance with all our questions. We are also grateful for the time and expertise of the many reviewers who carefully, thoughtfully and thoroughly provided several rounds of feedback to the articles in this collection. Candace is grateful for Jennifer’s wisdom and mentorship in the process of co-editing a special issue. Jennifer is grateful for Candace’s intelligence, passion for theory and pedagogy, and her hard-working ways.
We look forward to hearing and seeing how this special issue provokes the field of early literacy research and teaching!