Posthumanism and Literacy Education: Knowing/Becoming/Doing Literacies

by Candace Kuby (Editor), Karen Spector (Editor), Jaye Johnson Thiel (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138094413
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/16/2018
Series:	Expanding Literacies in Education
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Cuts Too Small: An Introduction; Part 1: Agency 1. Threads and Fingerprints: Diffractive Writings and Readings of Place 2. A Thebuwa Hauntology, From Silence to Speech: Reconfiguring Literacy Practices 3. Careful! There Are Monsters in This Chapter: Posthuman Ethical Considerations in Literacy Practice; Diffracting: The Ungraspable In-Between of Posthuman Literacies; Part 2: Intra-activity and Entanglement 4. The Untimely Death of a Bird: A Posthuman Tale 5. Reading Acts: Books, Activisms, and an Autopoietic Politics 6. Étienne Souriau and Educational Literacy Research as an Instaurative Event; Diffracting: Human Limbs, Dead Birds, Active Books, and Bucking Horses: The Work to-be-Made of Literacies in the Present; Monster Mutation The First Mutation: Sliding Into Summer; Part 3: Subjectivity 7. Lives, Lines, and Spacetimemattering: An Intra-Active Analysis of a ‘Once OK’ Adult Writer 8. Collage Pedagogy: Toward a Posthuman Racial Literacy 9. Choosing a Picturebook as Provocation in Teacher Education: The ‘Posthuman Family’; Diffracting: Posthuman Literacies in a Minor Language: Expressions-to-Come; Monster Mutation: The Second Mutation: The Workshop Approach for Reading and Writing Instruction; Part 4: Affect 10. The Posthuman Condition of Ethics in Early Childhood Literacy: Order-in(g) Be(e)ing Literacy 11. Encountering Waste Landscapes: More-Than-Human Place Literacies in Early Childhood Education 12. Abductions; Diffracting: Theory that Cats Have About Swift Louseflies: A Distractive Response; Monster Mutation: The Third Mutation: An Invitation of Being-With Monsters, Care-fully, Response-ably

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher