The authors examined how the spaces and structures of literacy classrooms were organized, inhabited, and felt by teachers and students in a new projectbased high school. The authors attended specifically to the political valence of these feelings: how educators characterized certain spatial arrangements (modular furniture and flexible seating) and curricular structures (asynchronous learning) as feeling democratic, in contrast to an authoritarianism that they associated with other instructional orders. The authors recognized that these descriptors, more than mere metaphors, were expressions of affective attachments that conditioned the classrooms that literacy educators worked to build-what the authors call affective imaginaries. These imaginaries, the authors argue, have material consequences both for how educators shape the world of the literacy classroom and for what practices are sanctioned, celebrated, and undermined therein. The authors drew from a three-year immersive ethnography in an urban public school to explore how educators imagined and shaped democratic literacy classrooms, how students worked within and against these imaginaries, and how resulting frictions impacted literacy learning in these classroom-worlds. Findings center on two interrelated tensions: (1) how infrastructures associated with democratic classrooms, at times, worked against other infrastructures on which students depended for literacy practice; and (2) how these incongruities led to new ways of surveilling students' autonomy in their literacy learning. The authors conclude by considering how these findings might guide literacy educators not only in attending to the ostensive, normative, and performative dimensions of affective imaginaries in classrooms but also in opening alternate imaginaries, better attuned to the equitable flourishing of all students. It is the middle of August, two weeks before students will return from summer vacation. I [Phil] am seated with teachers from the Innovation School [all names are pseudonyms] in the science lab, one of the few rooms in the building with reliable air conditioning. Over the last week, educators have refined curricular units in preparation for the year ahead. Now, in the final days of summer professional planning, they are translating this work in the design of their physical classroom environments. The principal, Ben, pacing the room, asks teachers to list qualities of their "visionary space, " their ideal setting for teaching and learning. "Temperature-controlled, " one teacher says, fanning herself with a notebook. The group laughs and begins adding other suggestions. Some name material features: modular furniture and open space. Others give abstract descriptions: student-centered, interactive, and participatory. Together, the teachers determine that the thread that holds their vision together is that the classroom should feel "democratic. " Writing the term on a whiteboard, Ben proposes that teachers use this imagined ideal as a guide for the day's planning. "You're not just arra...

No abstract

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer subjectivity has been tied to the living. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally bound up with the dead, with ghosts, histories, and ancestors that animate the imagination and attendant composing practices. Tracing the historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs) of an inquiry group of nine queer composers, this article spotlights queer ancestors as speculative resources for imagining and then composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Specifically, this article details how three queer composers, Coyote (they/them), Helen (she/her), and Margarita (they/them), restory the imagination, happiness, and reality with the ancestors, doing so to challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings attached to realist genres. This article concludes by inviting LRC studies to explore how HRSCPs might be integrated into future research and pedagogy and thereby pursue healing for communities long marginalized within the field.

No abstract