Tracing semiotic activity and lifespan becoming with across union activism, academic life, and wolf rescue

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

Abstract

Working from a diffractive approach to studying semiotic activity and becoming-with, this paper examines the dispersed, mediated, and situated trajectories of semiotic activity and labor activism in a graduate worker union. Noting recent work in education that advocates for attention to wholeness (e.g., Wortham, Love-Jones, Peters, Morris, & García-Huidobro, 2020; Wortham, Ha, & Alexander, 2021) as well as whole-person perspectives in labor studies (McAlevey, 2014; Bussel, 2015), I argue for the importance of semiosis in challenging modal privileging and compartmentalization (i.e., conceptualizing reading, writing, speaking as discrete activities) and of lifespan becoming-with in challenging ideological divisions that motivate isolated accounts of home, work, and school.

This argument is illustrated through an ethnographic research project I conducted with academic workers who participate in labor activism in the Graduate Employees’ Organization at the University of Illinois. For the project, I engaged in repeated (longitudinal) data collection across multiple types of data (e.g., texts, audio- and video-recorded interactions, interviews) that was informed by participants as co-inquirers into the relations between participating in union practices and other semiotic activities. Thus, throughout this project, my research questions were shaped in partnership with union members and their interests and goals.

This paper will discuss one participant (Austin) and his trajectory into labor activism across a wide timescale of moments. To trace trajectories of semiotic becoming, I note moments across Austin’s life, drawing from experiences with pets in his early life to work as a veterinary technician as well as postsecondary schooling in Kansas that introduced anthropology as a field of study. Then, I trace from Austin’s work at Mission: Wolf, an animal sanctuary in Colorado that cares for captive-born wolves and horses, to his enrollment as a graduate student in anthropology, membership in a union, and return to Mission: Wolf as a site of ethnographic inquiry for his dissertation research, which examines how liminal spaces between “domestic” and “wild” relate to broader understandings of colonial binaries, political subjectivities, and state violence.

Sketching how these moments have added up so far in his becoming-with, I analyze how Austin’s semiotic activity wove together and resonated across his academic study, union activism, and employment at Mission: Wolf by tracing that activity across contexts, noting both public writing (e.g., entanglements across his work on the Mission: Wolf website and his academic publications on embodied animal-human relations) and embodiment (e.g., how his work as the solidarity co-chair of his union has taken shape across, and in turn shaped, situated moments throughout his lifeworld). These complex relations highlight the importance of attending to semiotic and literate activity across the lifespan in order to enrich research processes and outcomes. Articulating worlding-across-environments, this paper challenges accounts that would freeze such environments and instead understands them as intra-active and fused from the start.

Author

• Bruce Kovanen, North Dakota State University