1st Edition

Posthumanism and Literacy Education Knowing/Becoming/Doing Literacies

Edited By Candace Kuby, Karen Spector, Jaye Johnson Thiel Copyright 2019
    270 Pages 83 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    270 Pages 83 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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