Returning to Text: Affect, Meaning Making, and Literacies

Abstract

Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text interweaves in new ways with human activity, through social media, surveillance capitalism, and artificial intelligence-ways that can be unpredictable and poorly understood. Adopting a sociomaterial sensibility that foregrounds the relations between bodies (people and things), the authors provide conceptual tools for considering how texts affect and are affected by the heterogeneous entanglements from which they emerge. In situating their argument, the authors outline influential readings of Spinoza's theories of affect, explore how these have been mobilized in literacy research, and identify how text has been accommodated within such research. Using texts from a political episode in the United Kingdom, the authors explore the idea of social-material-textual affects to articulate relationships among humans, nonhumans, meaning making, and literacies. The authors conclude by identifying four ways in which text participates in what happens, raising questions about how different materializations of text (or indeed "not text") are significant to the diversifying communicative practices that inflect social, cultural, economic, and political life.

Space and practices: Engagement of children under 3 with tablets and televisions in homes in Spain, Sweden and England

“…‘bedroom cultures’) and builds from the application of Actor–Network Theory to urban studies. Indeed, this approach has potential connections with a sociomaterial perspective to young children’s literacies (Burnett and Merchant, 2020a, 2020b; Mills, 2016), which could be explored in the future but are beyond the goals and analytical procedures we have proposed in this article.…”

Porous boundaries: Reconceptualising the home literacy environment as a digitally networked space for 0–3 year olds

“…For example, the affective relationships and interactions that characterise habitual shared reading routines have consistently been found to nurture young children’s literacy skills and positive attitudes (Mol et al., 2008; Pink and Leder Mackley, 2016), to increase children’s vocabulary (Harvey, 2016), text comprehension and enjoyment of reading (Jung, 2019), and to enhance young children’s initiation into family literacy practices (Marsh et al., 2017). Recent sociomaterial accounts of literacy have begun to explore how ‘something that we call literacy seems to emerge out of a complex and perhaps rather messy array of diverse materials, bodies, and impulses’ (Burnett and Merchant, 2020: 1).…”

“…In this paper, we focus on 0-3-year-olds’ digital literacy, which we define as: developing the skills and knowledge to communicate effectively and find information when using digital technologies; understanding, producing and sharing texts in diverse formats; being creative, collaborative and critical; showing cultural and social understanding of how texts are used, and being aware of e-safety. We recognise that young children’s literacy practices also involve non-digital texts and events, that they often cross material/virtual and offline/online boundaries, and that there is a close relation between literacy and affect ‘as text interweaves in new ways with human activity’ (Burnett and Merchant, 2020: 1).…”

“…Rather than being a private, bounded and predictable environment, the contemporary home is a digitally networked space, with multiple external influences. In these networked spaces, very young children can connect with distant family and friends by taking part in literacy practices that are ‘felt’ (Burnett and Merchant, 2020: 3) and not reliant on language fluency. That is, very young children can negotiate affectively intense relationships across social networks using diverse semiotic systems and digital media, often in unexpected ways (Zhao and Flewitt, 2020).…”

Affect Theory in Reading Research: Imagining the Radical Difference

“…These are questions being taken up in the rising interest in affect in relation to literacy practices (c.f., Burnett & Merchant, 2020;Rowsell & Shillitoe, 2019;Truman, Hackett, Pahl, Davies, & Escott, 2020 In what follows, we describe each of the four tenets of affect theory in turn, returning to our opening scene each time as a device for describing each tenet more carefully. We do this in order to highlight the radical potential for reconsidering reading through an affect theory lens.…”