Designing for Indeterminacy: The Affective Potential of "No" in Literacy Research

• In Event: Disrupting "Designs" in Literacy Research and Practice

Abstract

This paper considers the “enabling constraints” (Davis, Sumara & Luce-Kapler, 2008) of designing research in literacy practices around theories of affect (Author & Author, 2019). In conversation with critiques of design discourses as being telos driven and knowable in advance (Author, 2018) we posit how an attention to affect (Ahmed, 2004; Stewart, 2017; Author, 2019), specifically the affect generated through participants and research subjects saying ‘no’ to literacy practices and research design makes room for productive indeterminacy. The paper draws on our collective fieldwork in three different countries to attune to the different registers of ‘no’ including: ‘no not like this’ (quitting), ‘no not now’ (whispering, later), ‘no, my own way’ (writing as refusal), and ‘no not at all’ (refusal to participate in research).

Theoretical Perspectives
Affect theory is gaining momentum in literacy research and offers significant potential to untether literacy practices from euro-western colonial practices (Author & Author, 2019). Through attention to non-conscious, non-cognitive, and trans-individual bodily forces and capacities, affect disrupts measurements of who counts as a literate subject and what counts as a literacy event. Specifically focusing on the effect/affect of participants’ refusal to participate in literacy designs, this paper holds space for indeterminacy as a potentially generative approach to research. In normative approaches to literacy the wilful child, the recalcitrant student, the vulnerable and affected teacher trainee who resists are frequently framed as a ‘problem’ that requires action, a solution, a redesign (MacLure 2013). We think “frictionally” (Puar, 2012) with affect and literacy to propose problems rather than solutions: along with our participants we resist ‘solution focused’ research design in which resistance is to be overcome, co-opted or solved. Drawing on affect theory in conversation with critical literacy scholarship that acknowledges the power of the ‘deliberate silence’ Haddix (2012) and other forms of ‘refusal’ (Simpson, 2016) our paper highlights how saying no to literacy design on various registers can rupture knowability in productive ways that can’t be planned in advance.

Methods
We highlight the affective potential of saying 'no' to normative understandings of literacy design by thinking with a series of vignettes from our research settings with diverse participants including: a secondary English teacher; a two-year-old child; and a group of secondary school students – all of whom refused to participate in literacy events and research in various ways. We think-with affective vignettes in connection with literacy practices in two ways; firstly, we highlight the affective potential of saying no to normative understandings of literacy design, and secondly, we examine how attention to affect ruptures humanist logics that inform normative approaches to literacy.

Significance
Rather than viewing the effects of participants saying ‘no’ as an obstacle to be overcome with design, we consider the capacious potential of ‘no’ as a way of “undoing mastery” (Singh, 2018) toward a more just future for literacy practices. The paper will be of interest to graduate students and academics conducting research design and teachers and researchers of English and literacy across the curriculum.

Authors

• Kate Heron Pahl, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Sarah E. Truman, University of Melbourne

• Larissa Jane McLean Davies, University of Melbourne

• Abigail Hackett, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Hugh Escott, Sheffield Hallam University