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

Parties at the European Level and the Legitimacy of EU Socio-Economic Policy

Article 138A of the Treaty on European Union envisages 'parties at the European level' as integrators in the EU system. However, this conception is unrealistic. Firstly, the relationship between parties and legitimacy in advanced democracies has fundamentally changed. And, secondly, transnational parties are limited by the EU institutional structure and the dominance of national-territorial interests in EU politics. Accepting these constraints, however, the transnational party federations have begun to focus only on socio-economic issues, and to compete over the setting of the medium-term agenda on these questions in the European Council. Copyright 1995 BPL.