Inhuman hands and missing child: Touching a literacy event in a Finnish primary school

Abstract

This paper explores an inhuman reading of ‘hands’ with/in visual images of a Finnish literacy lesson. Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and the ontological turn, we disrupt a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, to reconfigure the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon, always already assembled in human and more-than-human company. We think with/in the concept of ‘touch’ as a method to reconfigure literacies as inhuman. We adopt Tsing’s (2015) art of noticing and present four ‘unruly’ encounters, touching surprising entanglements that e/merge when learning to ‘look around rather than ahead’. We notice entanglements of hand/writing, snow, flows of capitalism, mobile phones and a cardboard representation for our rethinking of literacies without assuming development and progress. Based on our analysis, we propose that moving away from identity, human exceptionalism and judging children on individual literacy achievement according to benchmarks that are external to the learning process itself renders learners capable in literacy practices.