The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices

© 2020 The Authors. Reading Research Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Literacy Association The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilities that are as yet unthought: a sense of broadening and opening out through enacting no. The authors examined how attention to affect ruptures humanist logics that inform normative approaches to literacy. Through attention to nonconscious, noncognitive, and transindividual bodily forces and capacities, affect deprivileges the human as the sole agent in an interaction, thus disrupting measurements of who counts as a literate subject and what counts as a literacy event. No is an affective moment. It can signal a pushback, an absence, or a silence. As a theoretical and methodological way of thinking/feeling with literacy, affect proposes problems rather than solutions, countering solution-focused research in which the resistance is to be overcome, co-opted, or solved. Affect operates as a crack or a chink, a tiny ripple, a barely perceivable gesture, that can persist and, in doing so, hold open the possibility for alternative futures

Magic(al)ing in a time of COVID-19: becoming literacies and new inquiry practices

This article conceptualizes the notion of magic(al)ing in relation to post-pandemic ways of thinking about data production and analyses. Revisiting old data produced pre-COVID-19 and engaging with new data produced during COVID-19, we consider the possibilities and potential of magic(al)ing as a theoretical concept. We think with several ideas informed by feminist ‘new’ materialists and post-inspired philosophies to conceptualize magic(al)ing: monism, spacetimemattering, blooms spaces and the pedagogy of an affective world. Over a year, we embarked on a reading/thinking inquiry about magic and literacies and their combined strength in locating literacies as embodied, relational, and sensory. Magic(al)ing has the potential to frame literacy moments as socio-material instances filled with affective flows and intensities. The concept of magic(al)ing fosters a space to not only rethink literacy but also to explore humans in relation to literacies. Kuby returns to an orange-paper-frog-puppet, a magic(al)ing moment that she often comes back to when thinking of the be(com)ing of literacies, especially in the uncertain times we find ourselves in a pandemic. Rowsell returns to a flowery artifact by a little girl who took part in a makerspace study in April 2019, speculating on how the same research could be conducted during lockdown. We also think-with new, unexpected data produced during COVID-19. As we engage again with these magic(al)ing moments, we explore the guest editors’ question: What methodological approaches are possible, and which kinds of research collaborations are appropriate?