Affect, Assemblages, and Literacies in Public Scholarship

• In Event: Pluriversal Scholarship: An Intergenerational Discussion of Writing and Literacies

Abstract

As emerging scholars, we have the nagging sense of arriving late to the party – always building from established research with a hope that there is something left to contribute. Deleuze (1987) points out that there never was a beginning. Everything arrives in the middle of a complex, rhizomatic entanglement, oblivious to conceptions of linear time. Each moment, place, participant is laden with history. In literacy studies, we can contemplate how our experiences shape the way we communicate and connect, especially in these unprecedented socially distant, yet globally connected times.
‘Beginning in the middle’ takes on exceptional significance in the context of the ever-germinating and anastomosing cyber network with which we are obliged to tangle, even more so during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Pressed to engage with our work and personal connections via digital means places us in the thick of the web, simultaneously diminishing and intensifying our significance therein. As a part of a tangible and infinite global community of past, present, and future, yet cut off from our traditional sense of personal connection, Carl Sagan’s (1994) “pale blue dot” syndrome looms – of what consequence am I? Paradoxically, we also fear the commitment and permanence of our digital footprint.
Our AERA Writing & Literacies Communications Team and Graduate Student Board discuss these worries in relation to the various social networks with which we engage as emerging researchers. Perry’s (2020) concern that literacy education policy is limited and limiting resounds in the hesitant fashion that we neophyte scholars navigate the digital geographies we encounter. Contending with our engrained academic literacies, along with a desiring for voicing our place in this space in the middle of what has become and will be, we are vulnerable to the fear of being out of place in a tacit and affirmed academic hierarchy. Social media platforms challenge us to make our claims publicly and boldly with constrained ability to expound and support our thinking and positionality. This may then become a worthy time to “attend to the minor” of our experiences as emerging literacies scholars (Ehret 2018).
Reframing this vulnerability in consideration of a posthuman sense of assemblages generates potential and openings for growth and literacy research. Seeing assemblages as non-hierarchal collection of human and non-human participants intra-acting in one moment (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) places us, our cultures, geographies, histories, language, and the platforms we use as equal and integral to possibilities and becomings. “Like a film where each frame contributes to the simulation of movement and reality, or like a still digital picture that is composed of billions of pixels, the whole is only rendered through the conjunction and creative efficacy of the parts” (Leggo, 2005).
We contend that recognition of the potential of the conscious and unconscious, and the sensational and spontaneous productions of an assemblage, might encourage intergenerational contributions. Further, the academy might honour the offerings and literacies from those who don’t seek degrees. Attention to assemblage and affective flows may strengthen our digital relationships and may provoke needed literacy pedagogies.

Author

• Jana Kirsten Boschee, University of Lethbridge