The Posthuman Literacies Project

Literacy matters.  It matters to societies, to economies, and to individuals. Furthermore, tangible academic, social, and economic repercussions exist for individuals, families, and societies when basic levels of literacy are not present. Few would dispute these notions. Children’s early experiences with literacy provide a critical foundation for future success in all matters associated with it.  However, while there may be widespread consensus on the fundamental necessity for educational systems to produce literate individuals, how schools should fulfill this mandate is the subject of much debate. In the Dis/Entangling Literacies Project, I argue that there is no singular pedagogy capable of addressing this matter.  Rather, literacy education involves an interplay between a host of social, cultural, and material factors, elements that are contextual, contingent, and unique to time and place. To address literacy’s indeterminancy, Dis/Entangling Literacies engages posthuman sociomateriality to mobilize an assemblage approach (Ingold, 2018; DeLanda, 2006) to literacy instruction that accounts for and works with the multiple participants, human and more-than-human, such as people, place, practices, and objects who play a role in children’s literacy development. 

Moving away from the limitations of human exceptionalism in historical articulations of language and literacy teaching and research offers possibilities for opening the space and engagement of and for literacy. However, despite its many possibilities, literacies studies that enquire into the practicalities and implications of utilizing a posthuman sociomaterial approach in the fraught space of K-3 classrooms (e.g., Kuby & Rucker, 2016; Murris, 2016), continue to be scarce.  It is into this theory <--> practice lacuna that the Dis/Entangling Literacies project, takes a full-bodied leap!