The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices. Issue 2 (24th March 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Truman, Sarah E.; Hackett, Abigail; Pahl, Kate; McLean Davies, Larissa; Escott, Hugh
• Is Part Of: Reading research quarterly. Volume 56:Issue 2(2021)
• Page Start: 223
• Page End: 236
• Publication Date: 2020-03-24
• Subjects: Theoretical perspectives -- Methodological perspectives -- Motivation/engagement -- Critical Theory -- Feminist Theory / Theories -- Post‐structuralism -- Ethnography -- Conceptual Change -- Literacy Studies -- Art and Literacy -- Ethnographic -- Feminist Methodologies -- Qualitative Research -- 1‐Early childhood -- 2‐Childhood -- 4‐Adolescence -- 6‐Adult; Reading -- Periodicals; Reading -- Research -- Periodicals; Lecture -- Périodiques; Lecture -- Recherche -- Périodiques; 428.4
• DOI: 10.1002/rrq.306
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0034-0553

Abstract

Abstract: 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.