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A lot has been written on zombies lately and on the rather conservative US-American TV Show The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–) in particular. A lot less has been written on the SyFy-Show Z Nation (2014–), although it is a sophisticated feminist take on the zombie lore. Centring around a group of survivors, who escort a human–zombie–cyborg across the US and Mexico, the show not only undermines the patriarchalism of its archetype, but also raises questions of post-humanism by the means of Donna Haraway or Rosi Braidotti. With the help of media-self-reflexive parody and pastiche, the series comments on its extradiegetic world as much as on its own genre and offers a deconstruction of stereotypical (gendered) tropes and conventions. In the following chapter, I use a selective close reading of the text and its representation politics to demonstrate how a feminist deconstruction of zombie-horror can come into being and how an (academic) distinction between Quality and Trash TV can be just as regressive as productive in this process.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate an ontological anarchist approach for an engaged post-human politics and present insurrection training as a pragmatic tool for researchers to directly transform the world.

The paper analyses how post-humanism has been criticised for dissolving political agency. It shows that this is due to the way post-humanism has been framed as sensitising and including non-humans into liberal politics. Instead, the paper examines anarchist-influenced post-humanism and combines this with the notion of multiple ontologies and ontological interventions. The paper presents the notion of insurrection training as offering the possibility for researchers to become emotionally sensitised to ontological difference. A case study of the “Seeds of Hope East Timor Ploughshares action” (1996) is used to illustrate what insurrection training and ontological interventions look like in practice. Finally, the paper makes suggestions as to how post-human researchers can apply this approach in their everyday lives.

The paper suggests that beyond a liberal framing of post-humanism as inclusion, there is also an ontological anarchist post-humanism that can support transformative impacts in the world. This form of post-humanism offers specificity of intervention and reflexive training practices. Insurrection training can offer new possibilities for post-humanist researchers: experience ontological difference, de-trivialise the everyday, connect to social movements, make post-human politics “doable” and offer “direct” change.

The paper addresses discussions that claim post-humanism is disabling political change. Its contribution is to map an anarchist post-humanism and extend this with concepts of multiple ontologies. It proposes the notion of insurrection training which places attention on the role of the researcher as an active agent that needs to be sensitised to ontological difference to carry out interventions. A case study of direct action illustrates what ontological intervention and insurrection training look like in practice. The case study suggests that insurrection training is an everyday performative practice that integrates and negotiates the personal, material and political. Finally, the paper suggests how researchers can adopt such an approach in their everyday lives.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways assemblaging communities work to support, hinder or disrupt literacy pedagogy in one English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Through an expanded understanding of community based on the concept of assemblage, this paper discusses the ways in which one teacher’s critical literacies instructional practices emerged, configured and ruptured through the assemblaging communities’ that affected her enactment of critical literacies pedagogy. A focus on assemblaging communities recognizes the de/re/territorializing power of the evolving groups of bodies that produce a classroom and pedagogy in particular ways.

Drawing on observational field notes and informal exchanges, this qualitative study uses post-structural and post-human theory to examine the assemblaging communities that produced the enactment of critical literacies pedagogy in a seventh grade ELA classroom. Assemblage theory is used to analyze data to examine the assemblaging communities that de/re/territorialized in Ms T’s teaching in relation to critical literacies pedagogy. This analytical orientation allowed for a nuanced look at communities as evolving, de/re/territorializing formations that, in this study, created tensions for enacting critical literacies pedagogy.

Assemblaging communities are always producing classrooms in particular ways, demonstrating the complexities and realities of enacting literacy pedagogy. Through analysis of the data, the rupture between the assemblaging communities that produced the enactment of critical literacies pedagogy and the assemblaging communities that produced test prep (and altered critical literacies) became apparent. Ruptures like this must be attended to because enacting critical literacies pedagogy is never done neutrally and without attention to the assemblaging communities that are always de/re/territorializing pedagogy, teachers may not be equipped to respond to the unexpected ruptures as well as material realities produced from these.

Educators can use the concept of assemblaging communities for recognizing the territories that shape their literacy pedagogy. By foregrounding assemblaging communities, researchers and educators may be more appropriately equipped to consider the real-time negotiations at play when enacting critical literacies pedagogy in the classroom. Enacting critical literacies pedagogy is never done neutrally, and attention to the assemblaging communities that are always de/re/territorializing pedagogy, teachers may be more equipped to respond to the material realities that are produced through their pedagogical actions.

This study suggests assemblaging communities as a way to productively move forward a perspective on communities that foregrounds the moving bodies that produce communities differently in evolving ways and their de/re/territorializing forces that create material realities for classrooMs Assemblaging communities moves the purpose from defining a community or interpreting what it means to looking at what it does, how it functions and for this study, how assemblaging communities produced critical literacies pedagogy in one classroom.

This chapter reviews different ontological positions and uses modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, and poststructuralism to illustrate how each changes the nature of research when attempting to decolonize the research method.

In this paper, the authors engage with embodied critical literacies through an exploration of the possibilities provided by the use of improvisational comedy (improv) in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to extend understandings of critical literacy to consider how embodied critical literacy may be transformative for both individual students and classroom assemblages. The research question asks: how might improv, as an embodied literacy practice, open up spaces for critical literacy as embodied critical encounter in classroom assemblages?

The authors used case study methodology informed by post-qualitative research methods, and in particular, posthuman assemblage theory. Assemblage theory views the world as taking shape through the ever-shifting associations among human and more-than-human members of an assemblage. The case study took place in a sixth-grade classroom with 28 11-year-olds over a four-month period of time. Audio and video recordings provided the empirical materials for analysis. Using Bruno Latour’s three stages for rhizomatic analysis of an assemblage, the authors mapped the movements of participants in an assemblage; noted associations among those participants; and asked questions about the larger meanings of those associations.

In the sixth-grade classroom, the dynamic and emerging relations of the scene work and post-scene discussion animate some of the ways in which the practice of classroom improv can serve as a pedagogy that involves students in embodied critical literacy. In this paper, the authors are working with an understanding of critical literacy as embodied. In embodied critical literacy, the body becomes a resource for that attunes students to matters of critical importance through encounter. With this embodied attunement, transformation through critical literacy becomes a possibility.

The case study methodology used for this study allowed for a fine-grained analysis of a particular moment in one classroom. Because of this particularity, the findings of this study are not considered to be universally generalizable. However, educators may take the findings of this study and consider their application in their own contexts, whether that be the pedagogical context of a classroom or the context of the empirical study of language and literacy education. The concept of embodied literacies, while advocated in current literacy research, may not be easy to imagine, in terms of classroom practice. This paper provides an example of how embodied critical literacies might look, sound and unfold in a classroom setting. It also provides ideas for classroom teachers considering working with improv in their language arts classrooms.

The concept of embodied literacies, while advocated in current literacy research, may not be easy to imagine, in terms of classroom practice. This paper provides an example of how embodied critical literacies might look, sound and unfold in a classroom setting. It also provides ideas for classroom teachers considering working with improv in their language arts classrooms.

The authors argue that providing students with critical encounters is an important enterprise for 21st-century classrooms and improv is one means for doing so. As an embodied literacy practice, improv in the classroom teaches students to listen to/with other players in the improv scene, become attuned to their movements and move responsively with those players and the audience. It opens up spaces for critically reflecting on ways of being and doing, which, in turn, may inform students’ movements in further associations with each other both in class and outside the walls of their school.

In this paper, building on work conducted by Author 1, the authors extend traditional notions of critical literacy. The authors advocate for developing critical learning opportunities, such as classroom improv, which can actively engages students in critical encounter. In this vein, rather than viewing critical literacy as critical framing that requires distancing between the learner and the topic, the posthuman critical literacy the authors put forward engages the learner in connecting with others, reflecting on those relations, and in doing so, being transformed. That is, through critical encounter, rather than only enacting transformation on texts and/or material contexts, learners themselves are transformed.

This study aims to discuss the ethical and political possibilities offered by the presence of teaching artists (TAs) and visual artwork in racially and culturally diverse high school literacy (English Language Arts) classrooms.

This study explores episodes from two separate ethnographic studies that were conducted in one teacher’s critical literacy classroom across a span of several years. This study uses a transliteracies approach (Stornaiulo et al., 2017) to think about “meaning-making at the intersection of human subjects and materials” (Kontovourki et al., 2019); the study also draws on critical scholarship on art and making (Ngo et al., 2017; Vossoughi et al., 2016). The TA, along with the materials and processes of artmaking, decentered the teacher and literacy itself, inviting in new social realities.

TAs’ collective interpretation of existing artwork and construction of new works made visible how both human and nonhuman bodies co-produced “new ways of feeling and being with others” (Zembylas, 2017, p. 402). This study views these artists as catalysts capable of provoking, or productively disrupting, the everyday practices of classrooms.

Both studies demonstrated new ways of feeling, being and thinking about difference, bringing to the forefront momentary possibilities and impossibilities of complex human and nonhuman intra-actions. The provocations flowing from the visual artwork and the dialogue swirling around the work presented opportunities for emergent and unexpected experiences of literacy learning.

This work is valuable in exploring the boundaries of literacy learning with the serious inclusion of visual art in an English classroom. When the TAs guided both interpretation and production of artwork, they affected and were affected by the becoming happening in the classroom. This study suggests how teaching bodies, students and artwork pushed the transformative potential of everyday school settings.

In this volume, we ask what happens when the researcher in forms of intimate scholarship is decentered – no longer the focus, but merely one part of an entangled material-discursive formation collectively producing the “results” of the inquiry. In the midst of the current ontological turn in qualitative research, we argue that this form of scholarship offers the opportunity to address directly the question of the post-human subject and generate thinking for the field of qualitative research more broadly. In particular, chapters in this volume highlight ways that researchers of teaching and teacher education practices can advance conversations and knowledge in education while exploring theories with an ontological view of the world as fundamentally multiple, dynamic, fluid, and co-constituted by entangled material and discursive forces. Authors “put to work” post-human, nonlinear, and multiplistic theories and concepts to disrupt and decenter the “I” or researcher-subject in self-focused methodologies, and/or to analyze knowledge and practice as co-produced by multiplicities of human/material and incorporeal elements in which the self is but one temporally “individuated” or “subjectivized” component. In the introduction, we provide brief discussions of intimate scholarship and post-human perspectives, followed by an orientation to the content of the this book.