ASMR, Literacy, and Radical Forms of Intimacy

• In Event: Affects, Intimate Literacies, and (Re)Imagined Curricular Possibilities

Abstract

This paper describes the ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) video – a visual form of technologically-mediated, intimacy-inducing sound performance – and its accompanying embodied, psychosensory effects, as a mode of literacy production and reception that blurs the boundaries between what something might mean semantically and symbolically, and what it could mean as a texture of sound whose pleasures are independent of rational thought. What, this paper asks, do the affective, sonic entanglements of ASMR imply for literacy teaching, research, and learning? Turning to a conceptual assemblage of non-representational theories, this paper refers to a number of ASMR videos, and considers the potential of radical forms of intimacy as a provocative challenge to the study of contemporary literacies.

Author

• David Lewkowich, University of Alberta