Tracing semiotic activity as becoming-with and worlding-across

• In Event: Diffractive Research on Situated, Historical, Embodied Semiosis in Accounts of Lifespan Becoming-With and Worlding

Abstract

Research on writing and literacies has often focused on key indexes of literate activity (texts, acts of linguistic and multimodal inscription, oral and written exchanges about texts) and on literate practices in specific sociocultural spaces (e.g., home, classroom, discipline, workplace). Matters of the social and of identity have been increasingly studied, but often within a framework where both seem more matters of settled menus of options than of intersectional and emergent phenomena. Grounded in flat, diffractive, ethico-onto-epistemological frameworks that challenge representationalism (Barad, 2007; Latour, 2005; Mol, 2002; Tsing, 2015), this paper examines semiotic activity, becoming-with, and worlding (Haraway, 2016; Holzman, 2017; citations redacted) by considering two lines of lifespan research that have assembled different diffractive apparatuses.

The first line (citations redacted) has traced the ontogenesis of inscriptional and semiotic practices through co-research involving multiple video-taped and artifact-mediated interviews that trace practices across engagements (e.g., tabling for varied purposes; model train construction; intersections among science and religious practice). To illustrate, we focus on a current lifespan study tracing one women’s becoming-with drawing and other types of artwork (e.g., painting, tattoo design, sculpture) as it intra-actively shapes her participation with science and medicine throughout her high school and undergraduate years. The study draws upon four years of collected drawings, other types of artwork, and a variety of other artifacts reaching back to the woman’s adolescence; semi-structured and artifact-based co-research interviews; and video-recordings of the woman’s embodied semiotic activities. The analysis maps how the woman’s early adolescent experiences acting-with drawings for family and leisure pursuits come to resonate across the literate activities implicated in her high-school and college coursework, her part-time position at the university’s health center, decisions about an undergraduate major, an internship at a local hospital, and her career path toward scientific illustration.

The second line (citations redacted) weaves together family life and research, with a patchwork ethnographic account (Günel, Varma, and Wantanabe, 2020) of lifespan becoming-with that focuses on Author 1’s daughter becoming a biologist/psychologist, teacher, and activist. This on-going research traces her lifespan becoming-with through life-history, semi-structured, and text-based interviews; participant observation; early videotaped research on a pretend game in the family (citations redacted); a collection of texts since elementary school; co-research products (e.g., a video reflection on her becoming), and memory. Analyses stretch from a childhood animal club she led to field and laboratory research during undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate work, to current activism in teaching (STEAM multimedia student projects), service (JEDI work in the Animal Behavior Society), and community engagement (designing a university-school collaboration to enhance neurodiversity affirming, anti-ableist practices of communication and co-inquiry in community-citizen science).

Both lines combine extended tracking of concurrent semiotic activities and retrospective engagements with lengthy dialogic histories and their long-term consequences. Both involve co-research and active researcher co-inquiry, aiming to engage with longer stretches of time, more diverse positionalities, and a broader range of activities than is typical. We conclude by considering the implications of diffractive, ethico-onto-epistemological frameworks for studying semiotic activity as matters of becoming-with and worlding-across.

Authors

• Paul A. Prior, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Kevin Roozen, University of Central Florida