This paper explores how language emerges and moves among other forces and bodies in a youth participatory action research project with multilingual youth. Using Deleuze’s (1990/1995) notion of stuttering, it illustrates how youth were connected to the immediacy of their socio-political-material environment through what are being theorized as rhizosemiotic irruptions.
Barad’s (2007) critique of the privileged role of language in dominant strands of Western philosophy is embedded in much of the educational research coming out of the ontological turn. While this critique poses a unique challenge for educational linguists, scholars such as Canagarajah (2018), Pennycook (2016), and Toohey (2018) have demonstrated the productive potential of decentering language to attend to the spatial and material aspects of communication as well as to the role of non-human agency in literacy events with multilingual youth (Toohey & Dagenais, 2015). Given that this scholarship is nascent, however, there is need to interrogate further the materiality of language in this new system of thought (MacLure, 2017). The aim of this paper is therefore to explore how language emerges and moves among other forces and bodies in a youth participatory action research project (YPAR) with multilingual youth. Indeed, the goal is not to privilege language but rather to turn toward it in order to grapple with the “as yet unthought” (Rajchman, 2000, p. 17) of making meaning. Data comes from a YPAR project that took place during an after-school literacy program in the southern United States. The purpose of the project was to support middle school multilingual youth in exploring and proposing changes to school and community issues through photography, storytelling, environmental planning and design, and theater. Using Deleuze’s (1990/1995) conceptualization of stuttering as a methodological frame, it maps how language stabilized, ruptured, and moved when decentered onto different modal planes and registers. In particular, it illustrates how each stage of stuttering—names, voices, and images—produced rhizosemiotic irruptions that connected youth to the immediacy of their socio-political-material environment. Implications include the need to view language as a material semiotic resource that emerges in conjunction with other modes and materialities, both seen and unseen.
