Social Bodies in Digital Times: The Affective Positionalities of Composers in Online Learning Environments

• In Event: Visceral Literacies, Embodied Inquiries: The “Affective Turn” in Critical Research for Social Justice

Abstract

Drawing on two years of qualitative research data on an online multiliteracies center at a major research university, the project on which this presentation reports investigated the affective positionalities of learners as they collaborated on compositions via online media. Online learning remains increasingly important, as digital media become common features of schools and literacy classrooms; yet, questions of how students engage and learn composition online are under-researched (National Writing Project et. al., 2010). The author also recognizes that writing centers are transitioning into multiliteracy centers at several institutions in order to provide supportive spaces for students to compose digital multimedia assignments (Murphy & Hawkes, 2010; Beach, Clemens & Jamsen, 2009) and to maintain these institutions’ vitality in a rapidly technologizing world (Author, 2011; McKinney, 2009). Therefore, the author uses “composition” as a broad term, inclusive of textual, digital, aural and visual modes of communication. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that is broadly situated within multimodality theory (Kress, 2003; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Kress, 2010), the author employs the “affective turn” (Clough, 2007) as a lens for examining the cultural, economic and political—or simply “social” as Massumi (2002) suggests—discursive realms online composers inextricably inhabit as they interact with others through technological interfaces. Literacy activities such as composition are always positioned within specific social contexts that give meaning to literacy practices (Gee, 2000; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003; Street, 1995), and individuals are likewise informed by bodies that are marked in socio-materially significant ways (Blackburn, 2011; Cruz, 2012; Dutro, 2013; Halberstam, 2011), even when such affective bodily capacities are produced beyond the body’s “organic-physiological constraints” (Clough, 2007). Online learning and video social media tools provide opportunities for composers to choose when and how to present their bodies to others. The author utilized screencasting as a means of video data collection and prepared multimodal transcripts (Flewitt et al., 2009) to note patterns and to build categories and themes for coding the data (Charmaz, 2000; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Initial findings have implications for how educators approach the design of online learning environments and how composers engage affectively with others around their work. The significance of this study has to do with the transformative ways that composers reveal affective positionalities in order to engage with multimodal resources and literacies as they learn with digital tools in collaborative online environments; these composers’ socially-charged practices carry certain affordances and implications about the nature of learning composition in online environments and the rhetorically informed designs that emerge from such environments.

Author

• Alaina C. Feltenberger, University of Colorado