Adopting a lens informed by posthumanism and materiality, we explore the dynamics of multilingual and multimodal story creation mediated by ScribJab (scribjab.com), involving human and more-than-human participants. We focus on agencements and processes of becoming at work in a multilingual and multimodal home environment.
Until recently, our work has been informed by sociocultural theory and poststructuralism, and we have mostly approached identities as belonging to individuals, situated in social contexts of unequal power relations in multilingual settings. In light of emerging scholarship on vitalism, posthumanism and materiality (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013), our theoretical perspectives have shifted and, while we continue to be interested in dynamics of power and social positionings, we have been thinking about identities in multiliteracies environments as processes of becoming and encounters of the human, the material and the immaterial (Dagenais, 2019; Toohey, 2018).
In this presentation, we explore the dynamics of multilingual and multimodal story creation involving digital technologies, French and English, two children, their mother, and other participants. We focus on the creation of a French/English bilingual digital story, mediated by Scribjab (scribjab.com) – a free iPad application and website enabling users to produce and publish bilingual stories online. We think with the concepts of agencement and becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980) in order to examine the human and more-than-human relations that emerge in story production.
We also explain how seeing the world through agencements and as becoming invites us to reframe the research process as performative, and therefore focus on the affective resonances (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010) circulating through multiple bodies in a video excerpt we share in our presentation. We invite viewers to consider how their own participation might change the research agencement at work here.
