Critical Posthumanist Literacies: Asking New Questions About Identity, Texts, and Ethics

• In Event: Critical Literacies With, Within, and Against Digital Platforms

Abstract

The creation and interpretation of texts by machines far exceeds our models of “literacy” in education; many more images, for instance, are processed by machines than are seen by human eyes (Paglen, 2018), and humans are increasingly writing, reading, and speaking with machines. In this paper, we will explore the implications for critical literacy education when it takes seriously computational agents that interact, produce, and process texts. While such work is only beginning in education (e.g., Carrington, 2018; Jones, 2019), scholars in other fields are increasingly writing about how AI and algorithmic mediation are changing the landscape of online intra-action (e.g., Noble, 2018; Tufekci, 2015), and business strategies and tactics for working with AI are advancing far ahead of critical literacy education.

Drawing on our own and others’ research into non-human actors online, and building on posthuman theories (e.g., Barad, 2007; Latour, 2005), we sketch some of the forms of critical consciousness that literacy education might provide in this new mixed landscape. More specifically, we focus on three areas of inquiry: texts, identity, and ethics. In each of these areas, we explore key examples of machine influence, re-orienting our understandings of our identities, texts, and ethics around human-machine complexes rather than on human authors and actors alone. Looking at predictive text, facial and image recognition, and content selection algorithms (e.g., in YouTube and TikTok), we will explain the relevance of each technological-human system to literacies work and suggest key critical questions for them. We will draw on data sources including semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students and instructors, recorded class discussions, and written work from undergraduate/master’s level coursework completed during 2019 and 2020, and on our own experiences using and teaching with computational agents. Aside from shifting the center of focus away from the human as an independent unit, we also offer teaching recommendations for literacy instructors that take these processes into account. What questions must we ask about ourselves and our texts in this new landscape? How can we push forward ethical considerations in this complex, and often little-understood space? Given the increasing ubiquity of computational/machine influence in our daily lives, asking these questions of ourselves and our students will become increasingly important in building critical literacies for our present and future.

Authors

• Sarah Burriss, Vanderbilt University

• Kevin M Leander, Vanderbilt University