Bewildering Writing Practices: Speculative Fiction and Affective Possibilities

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Speculative Fiction, Expansive Literacies, and Futurities

Abstract

In this paper, I present an affective encounter that emerged during a combined elementary and middle school summer literacy class in the Pacific Northwest. I think with the concept of bewilderment (Snaza, 2019a) to explain how my students developed an interest in speculative writing, which resulted in a powerful and collective emotional sensing during a writer’s workshop. I assert that bewildering writing practices were crucial to resisting the overrepresentation of Man, in other words, the white European bourgeois conception of humanness (Wynter, 2003).

Author

• Bradley Sullivan, University of Oregon