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Abstract

In this article, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives. We call these revisits re-turns to data. These re-turns draw upon moments with young boys playing at a makerspace located in a multiracial, working-class community. This idea of re-turn is not simply about revisiting a data scene; it is about re-sensing the social and what it means to be human through feeling with blackness. We offer Crawley’s theory of sonic epistemologies as a way to think and feel blackness, that is, to create otherwise worlds/knowledges/subjects. We argue that tuning into the sonic—or feeling with blackness—can help literacy educators thinking with affect to sense and develop nonhumanist ways of knowing/being/doing literacy, while simultaneously acknowledging the potential dangers of reinscribing whiteness. We propose that retheorizing affect in relation to blackness is necessary for literacy education, research, and ultimately, collective healing and justice.

Keywords

affect literacies race social justice sound/sonic epistemologies trans-corporeality postqualitative

SCRUNCH, SWISH, WHIRRRR. . .

The vibratory sounds of dirt shifting, sneakers sliding, and air swirling resonate as Hector and Lamar, clutching their cardboard swords and shields, circle one another, preparing to do “battle.”

“HIYA!” exclaims Hector as he lunges into Lamar, who releases a soft gasp, “Ugh!”

CLANK! Their bodies surge up, make contact, collide—again and again and again.

Watching and waiting, other boys soon join the playground “fray.”

Within these moment-to-moment happenings, bodies of children entangle with cardboard, costumes, dirt, air, and dust clouds, among other “things.” Lunging, jumping, bending, groaning, exclaiming, these more-than-human bodies circulate in and out of battle, in and out of play—creating “otherwise possibilities” (Crawley, 2017a) for literacies, for working-class boys, for Black and Brown bodies, for thinking and feeling. . .

My (Jaye’s) years working with Hector, Lamar, and other children at the Playhouse (a community makerspace) have helped me attend to the ways bodies of all kinds extend into one another, play, cocreate, and cowrite (Thiel, 2015a, 2015b, 2020; Zapata et al., 2018), and the possibilities such permeability and porosity create for literacies. Seven years later, many questions still come up for me as I continue to grapple with the moments we shared in the boys’ multilingual, multicultural, working-class neighborhood in the southeastern United States: How are literacies produced differently (i.e., socially, culturally, politically, economically) when all bodies are considered lively? How might we learn to think and feel differently about such liveliness once we consider the myriad ways some children’s “animated” bodies become racialized, gendered, classed, and so on within educational and community spaces? And, what becomes possible for literacies and for Black and Brown children, in particular, when the porosity of bodies is paid attention to as an occasion for meditative opening, an opportunity to sense otherwise worlds enfold and unfold (Crawley, 2020)?

We (Jaye and Bessie) begin this article with the above vignette and these questions to signal “an exercise of return . . . of thinking again about all that was compressed” (Crawley, 2020, p. 5; emphasis added), unnoticed, when “thinking with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) this same scene in other times and spaces. Inspired by Crawley’s (2017a, 2017b, 2020) theorizing of sonic epistemologies—or feeling with blackness¹—we position repetition as a means of staying and lingering with a data scene to imagine otherwise possibilities (Crawley, 2017a), especially for children who have been historically deprivileged by humanist conceptions of what counts as literacy and who counts as successfully literate (Snaza, 2019; Willis, 1997). In our desire to become “undisciplined” (Sharpe, 2016), that is, to “experiment” with nontraditional research modes and methods, we align with Black and feminist scholars who, for decades, have troubled the epistemological project of Western humanism that privileges hierarchical binaries, critical distance, the “rational” mind, and the dispassionate, disembodied autonomous individual (Crawley, 2020; Dillard, 2012; Johnson, 2017; Ohito, 2019, 2020; Sharpe, 2016; St Pierre, 2011; Strom et al., 2019).

Following these scholars, we engage in an ethico-onto-epistemological process that seeks to disrupt neoliberal, colonial, heteropatriarchal, and white supremacist ways of knowing, being, and doing. We argue that this simultaneous disruption and desire to do otherwise is critical for rethinking literacy practices and inquiries, as it opens educators up to feeling the sonic—alternative space-times where other social worlds already always exist to honor, affirm, and love blackness, which here refers not only to the mattering of Black lives, but also a way of thinking↔feeling knowledge/world/subject-making beyond white settler colonialism and other anti-Black modes of existence (Crawley, 2017a, 2020). Sonic epistemologies, therefore, invite us to retheorize affect and literacy from a place that refuses the abjection of Black and other marginalized bodies from the category of the human, while simultaneously investing in otherwise ontologies. Following King et al. (2020), who cite Fanon, we posit that to create and live an otherwise life/being is to “invest in decolonization . . . ‘which sets out to change the order of the world’” (p. 13)—to pressure the world of “Man” by tuning into and actively affirming nonhumanist conceptions of literacy, “literate bodies,” and the social.

In what follows, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives told across various space-times. We call these revisits re-turns to data as we engage in a thrice-told tale (Wolf, 1992). These re-turns all draw upon the opening moments with Hector, Lamar, and the other Playhouse boys. In the first re-turn, Jaye explores her initial reading of the data scene that she shared during a presentation. She does so alongside an educational colleague’s response to the boys’ play as “violent.” In the second re-turn, Jaye initially thinks with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) trans-corporeality and porosity (Alaimo, 2010) to trouble her colleague’s response, but soon finds herself troubling her own theoretical entanglements. The final re-turn is a “gathering together” (Crawley, 2020) where we (Jaye and Bessie) strive to put Crawley’s concept of sonic epistemologies to work to sense the possibility for something otherwise not yet noticed—while simultaneously acknowledging the dangers and our own complicity in potentially reinscribing whiteness.

Before sharing these three re-turns, we present the various theoretical concepts that inform our thinking↔feeling analyses. Specifically, we offer Crawley’s theory of sonic epistemologies as a way to think and feel blackness as a site of onto-epistemological possibilities. We then contextualize the community where the research took place and the concept of re-turn. We argue that tuning into the sonic—or feeling with blackness—can help literacy educators thinking with affect to both sense and develop nonhumanist ways of knowing/being/doing literacy. At the same time, we center the agentive capacity of blackness to create otherwise worlds/knowledges/subjects. We propose that retheorizing affect in relation to blackness is necessary for literacy education, research, and ultimately, collective healing and justice.

Affect Theory and Critiques of Anti-Blackness

Affect is a rather rangy and capacious concept, making it a substantial source of tension for those who wish to pin it down (Seigworth, 2017). As no one theory exists, affect has been described in many ways: as forces, energies, moods, and intensities. Largely drawing upon the poststructural philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), contemporary affect scholars tend to theorize affect as nonconscious, visceral bodily forces that register within and across bodies of all kinds (e.g., humans, books, sounds) to shape a body’s capacity to affect and be affected. Rather than employing a singular and enclosed view of subjectivity, these scholars conceptualize humans as porous and permeable human–nonhuman assemblages, or complex constellations of unfolding bodies saturated with affect (Leander & Boldt, 2013). Such assemblages are dynamic and ever-changing, coming together in various ways to create new im/possibilities for subjects, thereby increasing↔decreasing their capacity to act, affect.

By radically refiguring the human as an assemblage of more-than-human entities, affect scholars move away from linguistic/discursive analyses that center the making of individual human subjects, and toward nonrepresentational analyses that map out how bodies are produced relationally. In doing so, they seek to disrupt the Cartesian notion of the self-contained rational subject of Western humanism. By humanism, we mean a violent, colonial, and imperialist process of exclusion that produces particular White males, or Man, as “the human” and white supremacy as “the world” (Crawley, 2020; Snaza, 2019; Wynter, 2003).

Despite the desire to disrupt exclusionary humanist frameworks, affect theories have not escaped critique. One concern is that affect has often been taken up in ways that either dismiss or transcend issues of race, blackness in particular (Ashley & Billies, 2020; Palmer, 2017). For instance, within Deleuzoguattarian conceptions, affect has been viewed as an ontological capacity of bodies, yet what is largely ignored is how—within a white supremacist sorting system—Black bodies are not endowed with the same agentive capacity to affect and feel (Ashley & Billies, 2020; Palmer, 2017). So, while affect theories aim to decenter the White, heteropatriarchal figure of Western Man, they don’t necessarily explore how this version of the human has been produced in relation to blackness and the abjection of Black bodies.

According to Ashley and Billies (2020), “Blackness—and anti-blackness—is widely cited as the (continual, scientific, philosophical) birth of the human, which is also the birth of the world” (p. 9). As Wynter (2003) argues, Man is an invention, an overrepresented genre linked to European Enlightenment metanarratives, which function to produce Man as “the only permissible mode of being human” (Snaza, 2019, p. 3). Building on Wynter, Weheliye (2014) critiques Deleuzoguattarian philosophies for ignoring the complex ways that race, as a sociopolitical category, is both articulated and used by the powers that be to hierarchically sort people into genres of non/personhood: “full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (p. 3). In effect, the further one is from the normative subject position of Man, the less likely one will be treated as a human being. In other words, the universal notion of to “affect and be affected” primarily applies to those who have been classified as “full humans.”

Affect figures into this negation of blackness and Black subjectivity “through the inability to see or think Black feeling” (Palmer, 2017). In the United States, we tragically see this negation of “black affect” unfold day in and day out when the fears and feelings of White police officers (“white affect”; Muñoz, 2000) seem to matter more than the fears and feelings of Black human beings. As Wanzo (2015) powerfully asserts, when fear of Black bodies becomes reasonable in a court of law, it somehow “privileges affect of the [white] state over the affect of [Black] citizens,” which historically has served to affirm white fear and make the killing of Black lives “permissible” (p. 230). As such, affect is neither neutral nor divorced from power relations that work to maintain the social, cultural, and political inequalities that make white supremacy and “violences of the ordinary” (Hill, 2016) possible.

The Affective Turn in Literacy

Recently, the renewed attention to affect within the field of literacy (Leander & Ehret, 2019) has brought with it similar concerns, namely that literacy studies drawing upon posthuman and new materialist theories, which include theories of affect, have not adequately attended to issues of power and, as such, tend to undertheorize or overlook race and racism (Beucher et al., 2019; Dernikos et al., 2020; Nichols & Campano, 2017). Within this article, we acknowledge these critiques at the same time that we draw upon contemporary literacy scholarship on affect that has been vital to our conceptualization of affective literacies as emergent (Dutro, 2019; Leander & Boldt, 2013; Rowsell et al., 2018), material-discursive (Burnett & Merchant, 2016; Kuby et al., 2019; Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2016; Lenters, 2016; Niccolini, 2019), vibrational (Dernikos, 2020; Hackett & Somerville, 2017; Wargo, 2019), and historical—that is, where the past unexpectedly emerges within present moments to trouble the humanist conception of time as discrete and linear (Dernikos & Thiel, 2020; Grinage, 2019; Jones & Spector, 2017; Lee et al., 2020; for timescales, see Compton-Lilly, 2011; for racial hauntings, see Johnson, 2017).

While we have argued elsewhere (Dernikos, 2018; Dernikos & Thiel, 2020; Thiel, 2020; Thiel & Jones, 2017) that the study of affect becomes crucial for sensing how racialized bodies are “held” in place in dehumanizing ways, we are concerned with what “blind spots” particular theories of affect have enabled for us, two White female educators committed to justice. We are also moved by Johnson’s (2017) question of “What does it mean to be human in the twenty-first century?” (p. 493). This provocation pushes us to ask how we may engage differently with theories of affect so as to embrace a “kind of blackened knowledge” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 13) that does not adhere to Man (capital M) and affect Theory (capital T). As Weheliye (2014) warns,

If I didn’t know any better, I would suppose that scholars not working in minority discourse seem thrilled that they no longer have to consult the scholarship of nonwhite thinkers now that European master subjects have deigned to weigh in on these topics. (pp. 6–7)

The idea of re-turn that we posit throughout is not simply about revisiting a data scene; it is about re-sensing the social and what it means to be human through feeling with blackness (Crawley, 2020). To be clear, we do not mean to suggest that blackness constitutes an essential concept or subject position. Rather, it is a way of knowing/being/doing that coincides with a search for connection, for otherwise worlds, for a “desire to be in conversation, to think our worlds together, to figure out a way to practice justice and care with one another” (Crawley, 2020, p. 9). Until literacy scholarship retheorizes affect in relation to blackness, we contend that the field will have difficulty offering a comprehensive account of how materialities and inequalities are entangled (Hackett et al., 2020) and how blackness has the agential capacity to affect—that is, create otherwise worlds/knowledges/subjects that already always exist, even if “we” have been unable to fully perceive them.

Race and the “Whiteness of Literacies”

Scholars of color have long theorized literacies as social and cultural practices to understand how race shapes both literacy curricula and children’s literate identities, often in ways that perpetuate white, middle-class values that re/produce anti-blackness and anti-brownness (Baker-Bell, 2020; Delpit, 1995; Dumas & Ross, 2016; Johnson, 2017; Kirkland, 2013; Souto-Manning et al., 2018). These scholars have examined how such ways of knowing symbolically wound children of color by discounting and denigrating their languages, cultures, and experiences (Bishop, 1990; Gardner, 2017; Jones, 2020; Love, 2019; Smitherman, 1979). At the same time, they have also centered the literacies and epistemologies of Black and Brown youth and communities to affirm children of color as knowledge producers who are multiply literate (Baker-Bell et al., 2017; Haddix, 2009; Haddix & Price-Dennis, 2013; Johnson, 2017; Kinloch, 2010; Kirkland & Jackson, 2009; Muhammad, 2020; Nightengale-Lee, 2020; Sealey-Ruiz, 2016; Smitherman, 1995; Watson, 2016).

We draw upon this sociocritical scholarship to situate recent literature exploring affect in relation to the “whiteness of literacies” (Truman et al., 2020). In recent years, there has been a growing body of literacy research exploring how whiteness (as a force relation), racial inequalities, and otherwise possibilities (Crawley, 2017a) are mediated affectively (Dernikos, 2018, 2020; Dernikos & Thiel, 2020; Grinage, 2019; Jocson & Dixon-Román, 2020; Niccolini, 2019; Snaza, 2019; Truman et al., 2020). What distinguishes this work from other explorations of affective literacies is that it “thinks with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) popular conceptions of affect or “what a body can do” alongside the work of scholars of color who may (e.g., Ahmed) or may not (e.g., Wynter) refer to themselves as affect theorists, but who nevertheless write about race and racism as ontological and affective forces with the potential to disrupt white, colonial legacies and worldings.

Overall, this scholarship does not aim to draw conclusions about children of color or perpetuate pain narratives (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Rather, it maps out how the racialization of bodies (e.g., pedagogies, spaces) produces subtle affects and effects so that educators can work to become more critically conscious of the ways racism and whiteness affectively circulate, their own racial complicity, and how they themselves can disrupt its re/production by “adjust[ing] the relational field” (Grinage, 2019, p. 131). One way to adjust this relational field is to take seriously the role of refusals (Truman et al., 2020; Tuck & Yang, 2014), which can take many forms, such as telling a different story that perhaps has remained lost or hidden (Dernikos & Thiel, 2020); refusing to construct reading and writing as linear, discrete processes that unfold solely within classroom spaces (Truman, 2019; Truman et al., 2020; Zapata et al., 2018); or even refusing those sonic frequencies and affective rhythms that make social and cultural discriminations possible (Dernikos, 2020; Jocson & Dixon-Román, 2020).

We build on this literature to make a case for retheorizing affect and literacy in relationship to blackness. We argue that thinking with sonic epistemologies—or feeling with blackness—can help literacy educators sense nonhumanist ways of knowing, being, and doing literacy. At the same time, we aim to redirect affective energies away from whiteness so as to center the agentive capacity of blackness to create and affirm otherwise worlds/knowledges/subjectivities. Tuning into the sonic nudges us toward creative and experimental ways to engage with literacy practices and research, as it enables “fugitive modes” (Snaza, 2019, p. 8) that trouble long-standing ideas about what counts as literacy (Willis, 1997), who counts as literate, and even what counts as “good” research within the “body-numbing” (Ohito, 2020) and dehumanizing spaces of the neoliberal academy (Crawley, 2020; Sharpe, 2016).

A Theory of Sonic Epistemologies: Feeling with Blackness

Drawing upon a wide range of critical scholarship (e.g., Butler, Spillers, Wynter), Crawley (2017a, 2017b, 2020) theorizes how sonic epistemologies offer both a critique of white supremacist Western knowledge regimes and a celebration of the “fleshiness” of Black sociality and thought. According to Crawley (2020), whiteness, which is grounded in Western philosophical and theological ideologies, is a violent encounter that produces exclusions, namely by announcing difference of any kind as a problem for Western thought and, in consequence, seeing Black life as “that which is not worth thinking with [or about]” (p. 6). Such categorical exclusions are made possible via rational, humanist discourses that draw upon Enlightenment metanarratives privileging reason, individuality, autonomy, stillness, and disembodiment. These metanarratives, associated with the Cartesian notion of the mind as the seat of consciousness, create an ontological distinction and a hierarchical dualism between mind (consciousness) and matter. Within such logic, rationality can only be accomplished by splitting the mind (coded as white and masculine) from the emotions and fleshy body—that is, splitting the active subject of knowledge (Man) from both the “passive” objects of knowledge (i.e., things) and those deemed “undesirable” (e.g., Blacks, Native Americans, women) (Crawley, 2017a). As whiteness is a project that seeks racial purity (Crawley, 2020), this knowing, enlightened subject effectively equates to a profoundly racialized subject—that is, White Man, the only “true” producer of knowledge. While Crawley does not deny that whiteness produces a genre-specific subject (Wynter, 2003) that is also gendered, classed, and heterosexualized (among other things), his main point is that anti-blackness and blackness cannot historically be understood outside of these humanist and Enlightenment metanarratives. In other words, “to think theologically, to think philosophically, is to think racially” (Crawley, 2017a, p. 12).

To build an argument for moving away from whiteness and toward sonic epistemologies, Crawley further examines whiteness as an ocularcentric way of knowing/being/doing that hierarchically sorts Black bodies, in particular, into genres of nonpersonhood—as “not-quite-humans” or “nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014). That is, through the sense of sight or vision, Black bodies get seen/coded/read in a myriad of violent ways, for example, as ungovernable, out of control, terrifying, noisy, bothersome, violent, discardable, antagonistic, and in need of remediation (Hill, 2016; Johnson, 2017). Above all, Crawley (2017a) views whiteness as “theft.” To be considered “normal” within the white supremacist logic of Western humanism, one has to be rational, efficient, self-possessed, and still—which literally demands a holding of one’s breath. In this way, whiteness robs one of the capacity to breathe, to feel, to dwell in sociality, to “share in the materiality of that which quickens flesh” (p. 40). And, it robs us of the knowledge that human beings—along with all forms of matter—sonically vibrate with fleshy, affective potential.

As an alternative to whiteness, sonic epistemologies highlight sensual, im/material, and affective encounters, or alternative ways for organizing and producing thought that embrace feeling with blackness. Crawley conceptualizes blackness as a refusal to renounce the flesh, noting that the renunciation of the flesh is how the ideal humanist subject (i.e., Man) gets produced in the first place. By “flesh,” Crawley here is building upon Spillers’s idea of the body as discursive and the flesh material. According to Spillers (1987), the abjection of Black bodies has been made possible through disciplining mechanisms (e.g., via slavery—whips, via the present—bullets) that violently mark(ed) human flesh to create and maintain oppressive racial hierarchies. Historically, these fleshy hierarchies have been able to live on, namely through our cultural tendency to perceive skin color and other phenotypic traits as “proof” of distinct racial difference (Ohito, 2019). Rather than only view the flesh as a site of pain and exclusion, Crawley contends that we need to reclaim the flesh’s potentiality by reconstituting it as a vibrational zone we can tune into, embrace, and celebrate (Dernikos, 2020): a liminal zone where we can sense other space-time realities where different genres of personhood “beyond” the world of Man already always exist (see Weheliye, 2014). Referring to these zones as “black dimensionalities” of “otherwise possibilities,” he writes,

The sonic announces the fact of ongoing vibration, some felt, some heard, always—however—moving, always abounding, always there. . . . Black thought is the elaboration of the sonic capacity. . . . Blackness is the celebratory mood and movement, the posture and possibility of feeling something and being open to such feeling as a locus for structuring existence. Blackness, in other words, accepts vulnerability, openness, refusal to enclosure, as a fact of the flesh and moves with such acceptance against the impositions of a violent settler colonial and anti-black racist logic. Such vulnerability is about the capacity for being moved, and about such movement producing alternative ways of existing in worlds. (pp. 50, 56)

Again, blackness here does not refer to a coherent, essential subject position. Rather, blackness is an (onto)epistemology, a way of life that honors the vibrating flesh by refusing settler colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and the idea that there is one world, one way to be human. According to Crawley, these fleshy energies emerge as we think and feel the world in otherwise ways—that is, in ways that do not affirm Man and the violent world of white supremacy. He goes on to say that these vibrational energies must be felt, as feelings resonate with multiple potentialities. Resonance here is a form of affect that recognizes feeling↔sound as vibrational waves moving and affecting matter. These felt vibrations can be transmitted through both linguistic (e.g., shouting) and nonlinguistic (e.g., gestures) utterances. As such, feelings, words, voices, movements, gestures, literacies, sounds and so on are relationally entangled and mutually co-constituted (Dernikos, 2020; Hackett & Somerville, 2017).

Ultimately, for Crawley, sonic epistemologies open up ways for us to connect, to be in conversation, and to engage with one another relationally, “where we each are, and push each other to reach beyond and differently, to unlearn so that we might” learn the world differently (Patel, 2016, p. 83). As a concept, then, it does not belong to any one group of people. It is open to us all as an unfolding, capacious way of life that not only refuses anti-Black violence but is also committed to equity—with an understanding that, within a white supremacist sorting system grounded in violence and exclusion, “unless Black lives matter, no lives matter” (Journal of Literacy Research, 2020). That said, attuning to otherwise worlds is by no means a utopic process (Crawley, 2017a)—a search for otherwise doesn’t guarantee that the worlds we open up and create are any less violent (as we ourselves came to discover while staying and lingering within/across re-turns). There is always the danger of re-centering whiteness and white supremacy, despite our good intentions. Yet, “black dimensionalities” where otherwise ways of performing human—not predicated on Man and sociocultural racialization—do exist. Not only are these worlds possible, but they are (as we explore in re-turn 3) joyful, pleasurable, and affirming (Crawley, 2017a).

A Place to Re-Turn to

The data scene that we re-turn to throughout comes from my (Jaye’s) 5-year-long project working alongside children, places, things, and more at the Playhouse. In May 2013, the Playhouse opened as a result of a partnership between the local food bank and university with the goal of providing children with a free after-school and summer activity space where they could receive after-school snacks and, during summertime, free lunches. Inspired by the Reggio Emilia philosophy of education, class-sensitive pedagogies, and theories of social critique and justice, the Playhouse also aimed to provide children with an environment where they could be seen as full of potential, competent, and capable of building and expressing their own theories about themselves and their social worlds. On any given day, the Playhouse bustled with the energy of 20 to 40 children between the ages of 2 and 13 years, all eager to engage with university-affiliated researchers and preservice teacher interns. Racial identities fluctuated from year to year, but mostly the children living in the community identified as Latin@ (Mexican American and El Salvadorian) and Black when disclosing their racial and cultural identities to Playhouse adults.

My introduction to the community of South Woods was quite serendipitous. The rental community is located off the beaten path and hidden away on the outskirts of the county and the limits of the city. I was only made aware of the community through an exchange between a colleague who had been approached by the owner of the rental community to provide programming to the families and young people there (for more on our initial involvement with the community, see Jones et al., 2016; Thiel & Jones, 2017). Being a White woman in academia, I understood what my presence may represent for families. Therefore, it was extremely important for me to listen deeply to the desires of residents (both young people and adults) in my interactions and development of programming. I proudly grew up in a working-class/wage-poor home, and it is here that I initially found deep connections and understanding between my experiences and the experiences of the families living in South Woods. But it was the superhero play the young people crafted together that connected the young folks’ play lives to my own. We bonded over superhero stories and films within the first month, and that bond continued for the 5 years of our season in life together during this strange and wonderful community project.

Collectively Gathering around Theory

Drawing on postqualitative (St Pierre, 2011) inquiry, we think-with-theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) to help us trouble the ways that “legible” academic research has historically centered whiteness and anti-blackness. According to Sharpe (2016), such modes and methods do violence to our capacities to feel/hear/think/read/see/imagine otherwise. Rather than utilize a preexisting methodology with a predetermined set of processes, we engage in a relational, embodied approach that enables us to “read” data through various theoretical lenses. Here, we treat data as agential matter that calls forth open-ended and otherwise possibilities—as opposed to a still object we can code, dissect, and examine for conclusive patterns.

Specifically, we think-with-theories of affect (Seigworth, 2017) alongside Crawley’s (2020) theory of sonic epistemologies, or feeling with blackness, so as to embrace the messiness, abundance, and radical refusal of affect/feeling/sound to contain literacies, literate bodies, subjectivities, and social worlds. Our desire is not representational certainty, but rather, to evoke feeling differently about what it means to be human and to know/be/do literacy. The elusiveness of sound (which is a kind of affect) leaves open the possibility for us to imagine otherwise worlds that can be sensed when attuning to the feel of fleshy vibrations. Ever present, these vibrations may go unnoticed unless one turns intense attention to them (Crawley, 2020).

Building on Crawley’s (2020) idea of returns, we gather together to focus on one event to engage in what we call re-turns, which involve revisiting the same data scene at three different points in space-time so as to “tell” these moments otherwise. As Crawley (2017a) argues, otherwise possibilities refuse coherent tellings. By reimagining the social and what it means to be human, re-turns serve as acts of refusal against the violent settler colonial and anti-Black world of humanism—a world that does not serve our collective humanity, that attempts to divide and separate us from one another (Dillard, 2012). Re-turns—which here take the form of a thrice-told tale—remind us that the social is far from stable and orderly. As such, the fleshy unruliness of life and experience can never be captured and definitively represented by a singular authoritative account that promises an objective or “adequate version of a more or less discrete ‘other world’” (Clifford, 1988, p. 25, as cited in Wolf, 1992, p. 129). While these re-turns are small moments that don’t necessarily bring about “any grand political change” (Niccolini, 2019, p. 91), they perhaps can, all together, affectively jam the system (Truman, 2019) that keeps Man, white supremacy, and humanist metanarratives in place—that is, Western science’s “longing for one true story” (Harding, 1986, p. 193).

By refusing such metanarratives, we align with Black and feminist scholars who seek to trouble positivistic framings of research. These scholars do so by engaging in experimental practices that encourage improvisation, storying, genre blending, and materiality (St Pierre, 2011; Strom et al., 2019), while embracing the wisdom of Black thought/feeling/sociality (Crawley, 2020; Dillard, 2012; Johnson, 2017; Ohito, 2020; Sharpe, 2016). This scholarship encourages us to become “undisciplined” and helps us to recognize that such things as data saturation are tied up in a long history of research practice that is dehumanizing, disembodied, racialized, classist, patriarchal, neoliberal, and so on. For some, our choice to focus on one data scene may initially seem strange—after all, we have been “trained” to see such research as lacking in “credibility,” “validity,” and “reliability.” But one event is never just one event. One event in the present is always connected to events in the past and possible futures (Dernikos & Thiel, 2020). In this way, re-turns are porous and permeable stories with vibrational energies that “breathe into one another” (Crawley, 2020, p. 10)—stories with no real beginning and no real end, stories that contain sonic vibrations that modulate on and on and on, from one moment to another.

Having both experienced moments where our personhood wasn’t respected (Jaye as a child from a working-class family living in the South and Bessie as an emergent bilingual child with a Greek immigration experience), we are aware of how small moments can do harm to others, but we also realize that we have all been “seduced” by racialized histories of oppression (Dillard, 2012) that create blind spots. Part of our process when thinking with sonic epistemologies was to explore how easy it is to pick up theories like affect—that don’t center Black bodies and lives—and never address issues of whiteness, classism, heteronormativity, and so on. This both troubled and pushed us to revisit one data scene. We chose this particular moment (re-turn 1) because I (Bessie) had heard Jaye present on it before (although I wasn’t present in the moment that re-turn 1 happened). I was struck by the reading of the boys’ play as “violent”—not because I sought to judge this moment, but rather, because I wondered how I too might be privileging white supremacist discourses in my own research and teaching, albeit unintentionally. Soon, we (Jaye and Bessie) began to discuss how affect theory felt dangerously seductive, with its promise of nonrepresentational possibilities. Yet Deleuze, unlike Crawley, didn’t help us grapple with the overt and subtle violence of the current historical moment—or even begin to sense and appreciate the joyful emergence of nonhumanist, fleshy worlds (Dernikos, 2020).

At the same time that we wonder(ed) about affect theory, we do recognize that there is scholarship that “thinks with” affect to trouble the whiteness of literacies (our work included). We are not proposing, then, that we do away with affect, but we are encouraging educational researchers to retheorize affective literacies in relation to blackness. This approach requires us to think with and learn from Black scholars who have long been thinking through issues of embodiment and feeling. If we are to sense how race affectively operates in our teaching, research, and service to affirm that Black lives and literacies matter, then we must be in conversation with Black thought, sociality, and scholarship in our everyday academic endeavors.

Swords and Shields: Re-Turning to the Event

In our attempts at refusal, we revisit one particular playstory at the Playhouse that I (Jaye) recorded on video at the request of the boys doing the playing. The event happened on a summer afternoon (in June 2015) at the Playhouse. Summer was always my favorite time there, as the young folks seemed a bit more relaxed and playful than during the school year, when they faced concerns with early morning bus pickups, homework, and curfews. Conversely, summer was a chance to sleep in, stay out late, and engage intellectually in ways they saw fit. On this particular day, the boys came inside to a new collection of scraps to tinker with, including fabric, boxes, and refilled paints. It was the cardboard scraps that caught their eye first, and soon four of the boys had chosen to play with the purple cardboard that had held the fruit that was used for snacks. The cardboard was sturdy, and wavy, and just the right size to become a shield, similar to the one Captain America uses in his movies and comic books.

The boys–having recently learned about knights, alongside Captain America’s popularity–saw the cardboard shields as an entryway into a remixed world of pretend that unfolded in creating costumes and cardboard swords to complete their transformation into knights-superheroes. When finished with costuming and props, they asked me to video record their enactments on the playground. I obliged. In the video, the boys enact a typical fight sequence. Using half of the playground, the boys run, jump, and fence with one another, only stopping briefly to reset bent shields or swords or resituate costume accessories. Spoken language is used sparingly, while bodily actions are used most often to communicate. Every now and then, you can hear me (Jaye) laugh in the background, but most of the time a viewer will only hear the boys, and they are the only people in view during the shot.

I have enjoyed looking back and sharing this video data professionally on many occasions, and during that time, it has gone through many different analytical readings. In what follows, we re-turn to three of these analytical readings. We do so to illustrate how theory comes to matter in world-making practice and why which theories we use or privilege alter what gets noticed or counted in our analysis.

Re-Turn 1: Children’s Geographies, Affectual Energies, and an Unexpected Reading

Wearing their freshly designed and created costumes, the boys run outside with their materials. This shows the importance of having fluid indoor–outdoor spaces where children can take the materials outside to play with when they please, without having to ask permission. Zack jumps into the frame, wielding his sword and shield. It is clear that having access to materials of all kinds at all times is important. It lets them perform what they want to perform and how they want to perform it. Materials help them craft characters they may not have done otherwise. Suddenly Malcolm is there, carrying a stick. Malcolm wasn’t even part of the design and creation of this project! In fact, he wasn’t even at the Playhouse when all of this started. But somehow, he finds his way into the play, proving that fluid space between the Playhouse and the rest of South Woods is imperative. Suddenly I am even more grateful that we removed all the locks from the fences and opened the gates, so the Playhouse is in its rightful place as part of the community rather than a building that belongs to an organization sitting in a community. I see Zack’s shield get bent and I remember how nervous I felt when I was filming this scene. But of course, that was silly adult stuff. They worked it out in seconds, which is why limited adult intervention is absolutely necessary during moments of play. (Jaye’s analytic notes from a presentation given in 2016)

“Are you concerned about these young men being engaged in this type of play?”

Confused, I (Jaye) ask, “What do you mean?”

“You know, these young boys engaging in swordplay.” This scholar proceeded to explain to me her concerns with what she considered violent play and the ramifications of such play.

This question, which was asked at the end of my presentation, took me off guard a bit. Worried? Well, for a brief moment I’d worried that the boys might accidentally injure themselves when one tripped up and fell down during swordplay. I worried that the costumes, cardboard swords, and cardboard shields wouldn’t hold up long enough to get their requested video complete when the shields started bending. I’d even worried that one of the boys would be called home before we finished our work together that day. But not once had I been worried about the children playing with cardboard swords and shields as a production of “violent” play.

The data I presented that day centered around children’s geographies, which explores the spaces of childhood as being profoundly important in constructing the material–discursive realities of childhood (Kraftl et al., 2012, pp. 8–9), including what materials, discourses, and social norms are made available to children. As such, spaces can be created to indoctrinate and control bodies or can be created to see bodies as creative, capable, and competent. My analysis illustrated that space is affectual in nature, meaning what gets produced through playmaking is also producing children and the affectual energies (Thiel, 2015b) associated with a space and the people and things within it. For me, space can’t be separated from bodies (human and more-than-human) but rather are inextricably entangled and, therefore, pulsate with affectual energies that have the potential to assault one’s personhood. Community spaces of play are no exception, as they, too, beat with affectual rhythm. The purpose of my presentation was to show what is possible when children are given choice, materials, time, and space to craft worlds with little to no adult intervention. But somehow, here she was asking me if I was concerned with the violent nature of play with weaponry. As she spoke, I made a list in my mind:

Cardboard swords? Check.

Cardboard shields? Check.

Homemade costumes? Check.

Eleven-year-old boys? Check.

Knights-superheroes? Check.

Remixing literacies during play? Check.

But violent?

Re-Turn 2: Trans-Corporeality, Bodies at Play, and Crisis in My Truth

“Are you concerned about these young men being engaged in this type of play?”

I’m more concerned with the ways people are reading and dematerializing the bodies of 7-and 8-year-old Black and Brown children from a working-poor community (a) as men, (b) as violent, and (c) as problem bodies while holding cardboard swords and cardboard shields. Human bodies—who were also designing, inventing, running, jumping, remixing, painting—now are being seen as other bodies, as bodies that are too lively because they are being severed from the event and entangled in a raced, classed, and gendered discourse about their bodies that rematerializes them differently. (Jaye’s analysis from Zapata et al., 2018, p. 491)

The academic scholar who shared her concerns obviously had a different contextual and analytical reading than I did. While I can’t remember all the details of the conversation that followed that day, I do remember the way I felt after she shared her reading of the boys (whom she first referred to as men). She saw the play as dangerous. I saw the play as being something that might not be possible otherwise if I had stepped in as an interrupter, constricting their materials, their stories, and their superhero world-making practices (but one can never be certain what may or may not happen in any situation). I’d been recording their stories and sharing their world-making for so long, making sure to get their continued approvals for photographs and videos along the way, that I felt my interpretations of this moment were grounded in our (my and the boys’) mutual playspace, creative adventures, and world-making practices at the Playhouse. Admittedly, I didn’t check with the boys to see if my interpretations of this moment were the same as their own, given that I had also been a participant in the event. And now that our lives have taken us on different paths and directions, I can’t go back and ask them. In retrospect, this is a lesson I am learning as a researcher, to question hegemonic research practices embodied over a lifetime (Paris & Winn, 2013).

Dangerous play? This moment stuck with me. It made me reconsider the data—not as dangerous play but as possibly dangerous analysis and the limitations of theory/writing/discourse to adequately address racial aggressions that may read Black and Brown bodies in ways I hadn’t intended with my analysis. By entering the intellectual lives of these children, I wanted to trouble deficit-oriented readings of communities like this one. Perhaps spatial affect and children’s geographies didn’t do enough to work against anti-blackness, anti-brownness, and anti-poorness as I had hoped it would. For some, it obviously resulted in concerns over the actions of young Black and Brown bodies at play instead.

This crisis in my truth (Boler, 1999), that my previous analysis would help others reimagine Black and Brown boyhood, led me to my second analysis (Zapata et al., 2018) using the concepts of trans-corporeality and porosity (Alaimo, 2010), which explain how bodies (humans and otherwise) are never bounded but permeable, creating a space for me to better understand the liveliness of bodies and how bodies seep into one another. While not specifically centered in blackness, I believed that considering the trans-corporeality of bodies would be helpful and particularly important when thinking about what and who gets to count and how they are being counted, while also helping me make sense of how one moment can be read so differently by two scholars, both situating themselves in critical scholarship. Trans-corporeality felt like a theory I could use to illustrate how things like anti-blackness and anti-poorness are leaky, seeping across bodily boundaries of both humans and theory alike. And in a way, it did. But this theory could only take me so far.

Much later (2 years, to be exact), it dawned on me that there were blind spots in my theory. By solely using trans-corporeality, something was still missing in the analysis: the theories and voices of Black scholars. How could I possibly center blackness and trouble whiteness while simultaneously centering a theory that doesn’t speak to the particulars of blackness and Black scholarship? In my attempt to critique a response, had I fallen into the same trappings of whiteness that I was desperately trying to work against?

Re-Turn 3: Sounding Together, Affirming Blackness, and Seeking Otherwise Worlds

“Are you concerned about these young men being engaged in this type of play?”

STOP. REWIND. REPEAT.

SCRUNCH, SWISH, WHIRRRR . . .

Hector:

(lunging into Lamar with his cardboard sword) HIYA!

Lamar:

Ugh!

CLANK!

Cardboard swords meet cardboard shields . . .

CRASH!

Bodies of all kinds collide . . .

Jaye:

(laughing while filming the boys’ play) Ooh ooh ha!

(A few seconds pass.)

Zack:

(joining the “battle”) HEE-YA!

SWIRLLLLLLLLLL—Zack’s body resonates as it swiftly moves up, down, and around, propelled forward by air, dust clouds, cardboard swords, and cardboard shields.

(Jaye’s laughter weaves in and out of the play.)

Hector: . . . He’s getting away! (shouting with glee while calling for a superhero) Captain America!

Hector gestures to one of the boys, but the mere mention of Captain America registers intensities that pull at them all, causing them to stop their “battle,” if even for a moment.

Soon, the boys follow Hector around the large playground slide, giggling and squealing with delight.

“Captain America!”

Laughter swirls around the boys’ bodies, shimmering with vibratory potential.

With one simple glance and a high-pitched squeal. . .

“Hiya!”

. . . the boys are off again to do “battle,” moving their arms, legs, swords, and shields in sheer pleasure.

Re-Turn: Repetition with a Difference

Re-turning to this same data scene again and again and again enables us to make an otherwise relation to these moments of play and to these young Black and Brown boys—one that is not linear and nudges us, as researchers, toward improvised, fleshy possibilities (Crawley, 2020; Ohito, 2020). In our desire to tune into sonic epistemologies or feeling with blackness, we first travel back in time (re-turn 1) to map out how whiteness affectively circulates, coheres, and “sticks”—that is, we “gather together” (Crawley, 2020) to sense how it produces these boys as “men” and their play as “violent.” Whiteness, of course, is only one way to think and feel the social. Blackness is another. And, as Crawley reminds us, it is the preferred way for detecting otherwise worlds that refuse Western humanist thought and other anti-Black modes of existence. We then playfully imagine how else this data scene could be read once we feel the “fleshy frequencies” (Dernikos, 2020) of the sonic. But, before we begin, we feel the need to warn you: If you’re looking for certainty, you won’t find it here. As feeling with blackness is an irreducibly open and capacious experience, there is no one way to reimagine these moments. This reading, then, is just one possibility—one telling among many that “announces infinite alternatives to what is” (Crawley, 2017a, p. 2). A word of caution, though. Gliding around time, while often pleasurable, is a responsibility, as there are always potential dangers attached to it (Weheliye, 2005). As we will discuss in the closing, since otherwise worlds are not utopic, there is the possibility—especially for us as White researchers sharing a thrice-told tale about Black and Brown boys—that we may further reify and uphold white supremacy, whether we intend to or not.

Literacy and the Human: Whiteness as an Affective Force

Under the logic of Western humanism, whiteness is the default norm (Moolji & Niccolini, 2015; Muñoz, 2000), which would explain why, within mainstream educational spaces, the supremacy of whiteness has become so naturalized. This “naturalization” results in performances of affect that reproduce white supremacy, often in subtle ways (Ohito, 2019). For example, one way children perform “white affect” (Muñoz, 2000) is by using their rational minds to (attempt to) still their “irrational” bodies, desires, and feelings. Whiteness, therefore, demands that “good” literate bodies be rational, silent, still (Dernikos, 2020).

While “white affect” has been described as flat, drab, and impoverished (Muñoz, 2000), it forms the backdrop by which all other actions, words, sounds, movements, gestures, feelings, and so on become visible—that is, “colored” (Moolji & Niccolini, 2015). This racialized backdrop is shaped by Enlightenment metanarratives that link the ideal humanist subject or Man to whiteness/reason/rationality/silence. Blackness, in turn, becomes linked to irrationality/excess/barbarity/noise (Dernikos, 2020). These racializing metanarratives work to affectively align Black and Brown bodies with fear, suspicion, and worry, as well as a violent desire to punish, discipline, and police (Hill, 2016; Moolji & Niccolini, 2015). We sense these racializing forces of whiteness emerge in re-turn 1 as Zack and the other Playhouse boys become hyper-embodied (Weheliye, 2005): e.g, their animated utterances (“Hiya!”) and movements (e.g., lunging) are read as too masculine (they are “men,” not boys), and their laughter and play as too excessive (they are “violent”). But, at the same time, whiteness works to also disembody them: e.g., their brilliant literacy work and storytelling get dismissed, go unnoticed (as we will further discuss below). Ultimately, this reading of the boys shows how the making of humans, “literate bodies,” and literacies are “processes, actions, [and] movements of energy” (Snaza, 2019, p. 5). As an affective force relation, whiteness not only functions to assault the boys’ personhood (the feelings and humanity of the boys go unrecognized) but also restricts their “writing bodies” by (momentarily) directing affective energies toward those normative discourses/beliefs/practices that reproduce literacy and literate subjects in relation to Western Man (e.g., Black and Brown boys are unseen as knowledge producers and world makers) (Dernikos, 2020; Snaza, 2019).

Feeling the Sonic’s “Fleshy” Potential

While sonic epistemologies serve as a critique of Western modernity, they above all seek to find joy in Black life, and this joy can be found in the simplest of moments, in the most ordinary of places (Crawley, 2020), such as a community playground. When Jaye first read and then reread this same data scene (re-turns 1 and 2), she always saw the boys as joyfully engaging in brilliant remixing work. However, because blackness as a theoretical concept did not center in her analyses, she did not necessarily pay attention to sound and the radical possibilities it opened up for the boys, both as literate bodies and human beings.

As noted previously, there was very little talk at all happening during the play, but there were lots of human and nonhuman bodies moving together. Likewise, always in the frame, but perhaps barely perceptible, were sounds—sounds extending into bodies and bodies extending into sounds (Dernikos et al., 2020), sounds that launched an alternative to the white supremacist world of Man. These sounds, entangled with fleshy bodies-blackness-costumes-cardboard swords/shields-superhero comics-air-dirt-capes (and so on), created intensities that fueled the boys’ play, enabling them to use their bodies to improvise, “re-mix” (Weheliye, 2005), and write stories. Here, we build upon Weheliye’s (2005) use of the term re-mixing as related to “groovy” sounds (e.g., when hip-hop DJs mix music) or a kind of text blending that enables Black and Brown subjects to “structure and sound their positionalities within and against Western modernity” (p. 8) and the ocularcentrism of whiteness. If you pay attention to sound, you can begin to sense the movements of the flesh emerge through the boys’ joyful utterances, which signal a break from the dehumanizing logic of Western theological–philosophical conceptions of “(hu)man” (Crawley, 2017a). Centering blackness theoretically enables us to trouble the play as “violent” or a form of “illiteracy” by modulating affective energy in a different way. Every exclamation, every utterance matters, signaling a refusal of bodies to be stilled, enclosed, contained, and fully representable:

Hiya!. . .

Hee-ya!. . .

Captain America!. . .

More specifically, the boys’ joyful exclamations reveal space-times where improvisation gives way to new thoughts and feelings about what counts as literacy and who counts as successfully literate. What presumably began as “rough and tumble play” (re-turn 1) becomes a sophisticated storytelling experience where two genres of literature are remixed: medieval sword fighting blended into a superhero mission led by Captain America—a figure all the boys seemed to inhabit in one way or another (e.g., by repeatedly shouting his name or laughing with joy when hearing it). Black Panther—a film showcasing Black characters who, historically, have never been prominently featured in American superhero films (Jocson & Dixon-Román, 2020)—wasn’t released until years later, or perhaps they would have chosen Wakanda instead of “Camelot.” We also think it’s important to note that for much of mainstream America, the concept of superheroes and medieval knights remains “synonymous with white cis-hetero male exceptionalism” (Dallacqua & Low, 2019, p. 2). According to Dallacqua and Low (2019), the recent push to diversify the white universe of superheroes has been rejected by some, at times in violent ways. But here, the boys move with different affective energies to repurpose sound in ways that don’t presume Man (Crawley, 2020):

the beat of footsteps as bodies shift and glide along the dirt . . .

the intensity of utterances that rise and fall . . .

the relationality and collective vibrations of human–nonhuman assemblages . . .

By doing so, they create an otherwise world that centers the stories, characters, and worlds that not only matter to them but also affirm their personhood. And yet, while they construct a story from what may seem to be nothing—the whirl of dust clouds, joyful utterances, laughter—it is this appearance of “nothing,” this opacity, that is a gift (Crawley, 2017a). Because their storytelling is saturated with affect, it escapes linguistic signification—that is, the violence of representational logic. You can’t pin the boys or their story (or stories) down. The storytelling emerges moment by moment “in the process of juxtaposition and recontextualization” (Weheliye, 2005, p. 73), in the pauses and breaks. As a process, it is open-ended, collaborative, collective—unfolding across bodies, spaces, and sounds of all kinds. It opens an otherwise world where Black and Brown boys are not only creators of stories/knowledge, but also alternate universes—a world where Black and Brown lives and literacies thrive and matter.

What happens next? How will the story unfold? Where will it go? We can’t say for sure. But we can tell you this: If you don’t continually strive to “read” the social differently, to think and feel with blackness, you may miss the wonder, celebration, joy, and brilliance of it all.

“Otherwise, Nothing”: Refusing Conclusions

To say that words fail us here is an understatement. We haven’t quite captured the sounds of play-laughter-movement-joy/our bewilderment-confusion-wonder. But perhaps that is a gift as well (Crawley, 2017a). It keeps us open, on the move, desiring something different, something otherwise. While we have acknowledged throughout that our readings of this one data scene are but one possibility, we can’t ignore that we—two White, female researchers from particular social locations—may not be reading these re-turns in the same ways as the young Black and Brown boys whose play we story here. And while the boys did share their superhero adventures with Jaye and invite her to film their play, they didn’t check the telling of these tales here (something Jaye acknowledged in retrospect). Of course, in no way do we claim to speak for the boys, yet by inserting their “voices,” we do speak about them (Wolf, 1992). We never intend to do so with authority, but since whiteness has been “our” default norm (Muñoz, 2000), there is always the danger that the stories we tell as researchers—while partial and incomplete—may harm, which is why “we are charged with producing otherwise in the cause of justice” (Crawley, 2017a, p. 27).

Re-turning, then, to one small moment over space-time highlights how putting affective literacies in conversation with blackness becomes a matter of ethics. As an ethics project, re-turning recognizes the violence of humanism and how whiteness, as a humanist force, functions to limit otherwise possibilities. Our gathering together here also illustrates how—even though we are both committed to justice and have written about racial literacies in the past—detecting the subtle ways whiteness circulates and nonhumanist worlds emerge isn’t always easy. But the reality is that neither is openly discussing race and racism, which may be dangerous, risky, and painful, yet vitally necessary given the fact that racial categorizations continue to divide, dehumanize, and even kill (Dillard, 2012; Oluo, 2018; Sharpe, 2016). For instance, as re-turns 1 and 2 suggest, the way we as educators talk and think about race may be in tension with how our bodies feel and act upon racialized histories (Grinage, 2019; Johnson, 2017). That said, re-turn 3 reminds us that otherwise possibilities always exist once we tune into sonic epistemologies that affirm the lives, literacies, and social worlds of the young people we teach, learn from, and live with every day.

As sonic epistemologies are antithetical to the representational logic of Western humanism—that is, to containment, settlement, and conclusion—we refuse final closure here. Refusals are relinquishments, and relinquishments are about relationality, openness, something yet to come (Crawley, 2020). As Crawley (2020) beautifully writes, “we let things go only in order to receive” (p. 235). With that in mind, we leave you with this provocation:

What would it mean for literacy researchers who take up affect to feel with blackness—to begin with Crawley and other Black scholars rather than Deleuze?

Supplemental Material

966317__Jaye_Johnson_Thiel – Supplemental material for Refusals, Re-Turns, and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale

Supplemental material, 966317__Jaye_Johnson_Thiel for Refusals, Re-Turns, and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale by Jaye Johnson Thiel and Bessie P. Dernikos in Journal of Literacy Research

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank the editors and reviewers for their thoughtful feedback and Alyssa Niccolini for encouraging us to revisit Wolf’s work. Above all, we are grateful to both Ashon Crawley and to the young boys who shared their play lives so willingly—this article would not be possible without them.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jaye Johnson Thiel

Supplemental Material

The appendix referenced in this article and abstracts in languages other than English are available at .

Notes

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Refusals,Re-Turns,and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale

Abstract

Keywords

Affect Theory and Critiques of Anti-Blackness

The Affective Turn in Literacy

Race and the “Whiteness of Literacies”

A Theory of Sonic Epistemologies: Feeling with Blackness

A Place to Re-Turn to

Collectively Gathering around Theory

Swords and Shields: Re-Turning to the Event

Re-Turn 1: Children’s Geographies, Affectual Energies, and an Unexpected Reading

Re-Turn 2: Trans-Corporeality, Bodies at Play, and Crisis in My Truth

Re-Turn 3: Sounding Together, Affirming Blackness, and Seeking Otherwise Worlds

Re-Turn: Repetition with a Difference

Literacy and the Human: Whiteness as an Affective Force

Feeling the Sonic’s “Fleshy” Potential

“Otherwise, Nothing”: Refusing Conclusions

Supplemental Material

966317__Jaye_Johnson_Thiel – Supplemental material for Refusals, Re-Turns, and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Supplemental Material

Notes

References

Supplementary Material