Perpetual Motion: Assemblages and Scaling in Literacy Studies

• In Event: 68.059 - Assembling the Assemblage in Literacy Studies

Abstract

Purpose

Following the call to re-examine the presence of the global in local literacy practices (Brandt & Clinton, 2002), many literacy scholars have turned to “assemblage theory” to conceptualize literacy as a series of socio-material processes (Kell, 2011). We take up the notion of the social as a "circulation of entities" through the work of philosopher Manuel DeLanda to reframe more traditional ethnographic data using multi-scaled ‘assemblages’ as a core heuristic.


Theoretical Framing

Grounded in “assemblage theory”, we conceptualize the “social” dimension of literacy practices not as an a priori condition, but rather as an assemblage of circulating entities, activities, and artifacts that participate in the action of literacy events at multiple scales. In this presentation, we closely consider the work of socio-material philosophy of DeLanda, focusing specifically on his exegesis of ‘assemblage theory’, which brings together some of the most useful resources from Deleuze & Guattari that have already found resonance with some literacy researchers (Author 2), but which find a more sustained articulation in DeLanda. We argue DeLanda’s conceptualization of assemblages offers a robust theoretical framework for literacy researchers to draw from.


Data Sources/Method

These data are taken from an interactional ethnography (Bloome & Carter, 2014) of an urban Catholic elementary school and parish in Philadelphia. Grade 8 students' classroom literacy practices were observed and interactions regularly audio-recording for an academic year. Revisiting these data by drawing on DeLanda’s insights, we can see how intensely ‘local’ sets of practices actually participate in larger assemblages of institutions, practices, and movement across spatio-temporal scales.


Findings

Focusing on the movement of literacy practices and artifacts, our study suggests that the Catholic school offers substantive opportunities for students to use literacy to project meaning across temporal and geographic space. We trace the way students and teachers maintain the continual motion of texts and practices, reshuffling associations in relation to changing circumstances and emerging pressures, and in doing so articulate the value of ‘assemblages’ for literacy theorists. Further, we consider some lingering challenges in deploying DeLanda’s method: namely, while it allows researchers to retain many of the helpful theoretical/methodological resources we already use, in can risk reifying scales as discrete, static plans of activity if these resources failed to account for movement in and between scales.


Significance

DeLanda’s articulation of assemblage theory builds on existing efforts within NLS to open the frame of localized “literacy events” to include the broad network of actors and relationships that comprise them. As our reconsideration of ethnographic data demonstrates, bringing such a stance to literacy research does not require us to abandon those analytical methods that have previously been helpful in illuminating the nuances of social practice, but rather, it allows us to see how these methods might be combined with other resources to more fully observe, describe, and understand the contingent constellation of relations that give shape to literacy activities.

Authors

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Lethbridge

• T. Philip Nichols, University of Pennsylvania