In this article, the authors (re)think writing as an ethical endeavor to explore and to cultivate more inclusive orientations for writing research and teaching. Situated in posthumanist scholarship on intra-activity, trans-corporeality, and translingual assemblages, they provide data–theory encounters that resist the privileging of alphabetic print, standardized written English approaches to writing pedagogies that have detached writers from the contextual doing/being/feeling demanded of composing-with-all-bodies. Data in the article are drawn from three separate research projects. Diffractively reading data through posthumanist theoretical concepts, the authors highlight the tensions and insights produced from their analysis to provoke an ethico-onto-epistemological shift in writing studies and classroom pedagogies, and to enliven the ethical work of exploring and cultivating more inclusive orientations to writing research and teaching.

Critical text selection of inclusive children's literature plays an essential role in fostering classroom spaces that honor the perspectives of diverse cognitive and physical ways of being, knowing, and learning.

Purpose Literacy research exploring multimodal composition and justice-oriented children’s literature each have rich landscapes and histories. This paper aims to add to both of these bodies of scholarship through the emerging assemblage of Studio F, a fifth-grade classroom. The authors share poststructural analytic encounters with attention to the unexpected multimodal relationships and the justice-oriented talk and texts that emerged, as well as the classroom conditions that produce them. Design/methodology/approach The authors think with assemblage theory to examine the newness that emerged as one small group of students wrestled with the emerging instances of racism present in Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles. Findings Together, the living arrangement of bodies, materials and discourses created openings for students’ explorations of race and racism. Originality/value This paper offers teachers and researchers space to rethink what is possible in the literacy classroom when the authors re-envision classrooms as vibrant assemblages, support emergent multimodal composing processes and follow students’ critical encounters toward justice-oriented literacies.

When faced with mandated curricular constraints and narrow literacy outcome expectations, how can adolescent literacy educators address the justice-oriented activism unfolding in the lives of students and across the globe?

The purpose of this study was to examine how young children and their teacher constructed literary meaning through engagement with postmodern picturebooks. We framed our enquiry around Langer's Envisionment Building theory and specifically examined how young children formed meaning as they moved through Langer's five stances during and after text encounters. We draw special attention to the dialogic nature of transactions around texts, children's understandings and appropriation of postmodern picturebook metafictive devices, and the ways in which they hybridize personal experiences with intertextual storyworlds. Our enquiry illuminates how young children and their teacher, having engaged with postmodern picturebooks, readily took up the work of envisionment building to construct novel and complex understandings and 'go beyond'. Our research further exemplifies how the multifaceted nature of postmodern picturebooks provides rich opportunities for young children to negotiate diverse textual features and respond in unique and meaningful ways as they engage in literary meaning making.