“Wearing Only Our Skin”: the multimodal literacies classroom as a living arrangement

Purpose Literacy research exploring multimodal composition and justice-oriented children’s literature each have rich landscapes and histories. This paper aims to add to both of these bodies of scholarship through the emerging assemblage of Studio F, a fifth-grade classroom. The authors share poststructural analytic encounters with attention to the unexpected multimodal relationships and the justice-oriented talk and texts that emerged, as well as the classroom conditions that produce them. Design/methodology/approach The authors think with assemblage theory to examine the newness that emerged as one small group of students wrestled with the emerging instances of racism present in Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles. Findings Together, the living arrangement of bodies, materials and discourses created openings for students’ explorations of race and racism. Originality/value This paper offers teachers and researchers space to rethink what is possible in the literacy classroom when the authors re-envision classrooms as vibrant assemblages, support emergent multimodal composing processes and follow students’ critical encounters toward justice-oriented literacies.

Making Space for What Lies in the Interstices: The Composing Practices of Single Moms

This article focuses on the composition practices of three single moms across academic ranks and single mom identities in order to expand our understanding in Composition and Rhetoric of how composing processes are influenced by lived experience and material circumstances. Drawing on composition process research, I argue for the need to give greater attention to the individual composing practices of those with marginalized identities in order to strengthen our work in Comp/Rhet as teachers, mentors, and colleagues. Written in a style that combines testimonios and analysis, this article pushes and expands our understanding of what counts as composition practice, why composition practice does not happen, and how composition practices in and out of the classroom can be valuable resources.

Affective intensities: Emotion, race, gender and the push and pull of bodies

Purpose This study aims to investigate the ways affective intensities arise in the intra-actions within an assemblage (three Black girls, objects such as computers and hoodies, institutionalized discourse associated with race and successful participation in schools) as the girls create multimodal responses to literature. This paper shows how the intra-actions among the girls and material objects produce affective intensities or new ways of being and becoming through which youth reauthor themselves as central and peripheral participants. Design/methodology/approach The authors present an illustrative case of the ways girls’ embodied literacy identities emerge when Jillian, Isa, and Rhianna intra-act with materials in an assemblage that includes their material-discursive positionings through qualitative and multimodal interaction analysis. Findings The analysis describes the ways the girls agentively participate through play, composing and moments of becoming (fluid subjectivities) that include emotive acts such as acts of solidarity, loving connectedness and possible frustration that inform who counts and who can be successful in the classroom. Research limitations/implications This single case study gives a descriptive, in-depth analysis of the ways affective intensities emerge as three girls respond to literature to understand their embodied and discursive practices within the composing process. Originality/value To fully understand agency and the students’ emergent subjectivities, the authors combine embodiment and material-discursive analysis to understand affective intensities that evolve during three Black girls’ composing processes and the ways the girls’ subjectivities shift within the intra-actions.