68.059 - Assembling the Assemblage in Literacy Studies

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Increasingly researchers have turned to the resources of “assemblage theory” to attend to the contingent processes by which literacy practices emerge from networks of actors, human and non-human. Despite this resonance, the concept of “assemblage” remains somewhat nebulous - sometimes invoked as a taken-for-granted term with transparent theoretical/methodological commitments, rather than a contested framework with its own internal heterogeneity. Starting from the assumption that there are multiple “assemblage theories,” this panel brings together scholars whose work puts different configurations of “assemblages” to work in mapping, analyzing, and representing literacy events and practices. In doing so, it opens space for dialogue about the continuities/discontinuities, possibilities/challenges that surface as these different “assemblage theories” are put to use in literacy research.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Writing and Literacies

Chair

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Lethbridge

Papers

• Perpetual Motion: Assemblages and Scaling in Literacy Studies - Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Lethbridge; T. Philip Nichols, University of Pennsylvania

• Thinking the Assemblage: Immanence in the Movements of Narratives, LEGO, and a Child - Kevin M Leander, Vanderbilt University; Gail M. Boldt, The Pennsylvania State University

• Shifting Frameworks: Affordances of Literacy-in-Action in Children's Critical Literacy - Kimberly Lenters, University of Calgary

• Laminated Assemblage as Becoming: A Flat Cultural Historical Activity Theory Approach to Transliterate Practice and Development - Paul A. Prior, University of Illinois; Anna Smith, Illinois State University

Discussant

• Jennifer Rowsell, Brock University