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The reader of this article is invited to join an encounter of methodological experimenting, productive tensions and a way of writing that seeks to challenge conventional human- and language-centered scholarly discourses. This article speculates with the possibility of two dissenting ontologies co-existing simultaneously and making each other visible. Troubling moments of the ontologies rubbing together are elaborated as friction and demonstrated in “queer reiterations” presented throughout the article. The moments of friction orient and reorient the research process. The article draws on Barad’s agential realist onto-epistemology in an interdisciplinary ethnographic research project embedded in psychometric capturing of data. The first part of the article scrutinizes theoretical frictions. The second part, “empirical frictions” takes the reader through encounters with so-called fieldwork and data. The final layer of research writing, “productive frictions” has been inspired by Haraway’s cyborg manifesto to foreground the emergence of the Queer Cyborg Ethnographer.

This paper explores an inhuman reading of ‘hands’ with/in visual images of a Finnish literacy lesson. Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and the ontological turn, we disrupt a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, to reconfigure the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon, always already assembled in human and more-than-human company. We think with/in the concept of ‘touch’ as a method to reconfigure literacies as inhuman. We adopt Tsing’s (2015) art of noticing and present four ‘unruly’ encounters, touching surprising entanglements that e/merge when learning to ‘look around rather than ahead’. We notice entanglements of hand/writing, snow, flows of capitalism, mobile phones and a cardboard representation for our rethinking of literacies without assuming development and progress. Based on our analysis, we propose that moving away from identity, human exceptionalism and judging children on individual literacy achievement according to benchmarks that are external to the learning process itself renders learners capable in literacy practices.