Abstract Summary
This presentation examines how some language and literacy researchers are attending to relations between humans and their environments. They are searching for broader theoretical frameworks and more inclusive approaches to education to account for the entanglements of humans and materials as multiple things and bodily relations come into being together.
Abstract :
With researchers who see relations between humans and their environments as ethical matters of concern (Alaimo, 2010), a number of language and literacy scholars are now attending carefully to these relationships as they search for broader theoretical frameworks and more inclusive approaches to education that might better account for the entanglements of humans and materials and their effects in processes of marginalization (Zapata, Kuby, & Thiel, 2018). Moving away from anthropocentrism, they have turned to work in many disciplines on new materialism and relational ontologies (Barad, 2007), posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013), Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), and new empiricism (St-Pierre, 2012). Though at times abstract and dense, this literature is rich and provocative because it challenges boundary-thinking, calling into question long-established Cartesian binaries such as human/nonhuman and assumptions that the subject exists outside the discursive and the material. Approaching phenomena under investigation as unpredictable processes of becoming in the world, this scholarship is not only concerned with epistemology, but it is equally interested in ontology and axiology. It considers the theoretical and practical implications of researching how multiple things and bodily relations come into being together. To pursue these lines of inquiry, some recent publications on language and literacy learning and teaching are exploring how various theoretical constructs introduced in the literature, such as entanglement, assemblage, intra-action and becoming, may be helpful in interpreting data from field-based studies (Fleming, Waterhouse, Bangou, & Bastien, 2017; Kuby & Rowsell, 2017; Toohey et al., 2015). In this presentation, I review how some of these constructs are being taken up in current research, including in an ongoing project undertaken with my colleagues (Dagenais, Brisson, Forte & André, 2019) on environments of multilingual and multimodal digital story production.
