ERIC Number: EJ1290114
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0034-0553
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Available Date: N/A
The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices
Truman, Sarah E.; Hackett, Abigail; Pahl, Kate; McLean Davies, Larissa; Escott, Hugh
Reading Research Quarterly, v56 n2 p223-236 Apr-Jun 2021
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.
Descriptors: Literacy Education, Affective Behavior, Resistance (Psychology), Humanism, Psychological Patterns, Vignettes, Nonverbal Communication
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www-wiley-com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
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Audience: N/A
Language: English
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