Attending to Our Response-abilities: Diff/Reading Data Through Pedagogies of the Other-wise

Abstract

In times of global emergencies and shifting social priorities worldwide, literacy researchers must recognize how ethnographic methods―foregrounded by New Literacy Studies researchers―may be rendered temporarily and persistently inaccessible. These conditions force us to work other-wise, employing new materialism to contemplate methodologies of the other-wise by channelling our response-abilities (Barad, 2007). Our theorizing extends emerging literature of the other-wise (Kuby and Gutshall Rucker, 2020; Wohlwend, 2019) to make the matter of literacy research come through the dynamics of working remotely, across different time zones and political climates. Across the United States, England, and Canada, our inquiry asks: How do diffractive methodologies help literacy researchers attune to the other-wise? How do these methodologies help us reimagine literacies in ways that support equitable and fully lived futures? We examine these questions by diffractively reading our data and each other’s over time—rethinking our methodologies in previous research sites, the literacies that mattered in them, and the literacies that matter now. Datasets come from studies of (a) middle school youths’ literacies in an English Language Arts classroom, (b) preschool children’s digital literacies at home, and (c) a high school youths’ stop-motion environmental literacy project. These diffractive readings extend NLS methodological principles through attention to how sociomaterial assemblages (Burnett and Merchant, 2020) and affective dimensions of literacies (Rowsell, 2020) come to matter differently in the midst of unprecedented global unrest. Attuning to the shift from NLS in its text-mode oriented combinations towards an ontology of postqualitative literacies, our chapter elucidates diffractive readings to attend to time, situatedness, and political tensions.