An Ethico-Onto-Epistemological Approach to Literacy Research

An Opening to the Unthought

Recent scholarship has animated interest in the influence of nonhuman elements in research contexts, including molecular matter, animal life, and technological attachments (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lather, 2013; St. Pierre, 2011). This type of work challenges conventional research methods and normative branches of interpretation that are rooted in seemingly pure and complete representations of subjects. In this article, I trace how understanding interwoven becomings of literacy researchers and technological instruments can inform a developing ethico-onto-epistemological stance.

Ethico-onto-epistemology highlights the interrelatedness of “ethics, knowing, and being” (Barad, 2007, p. 185) across unstable and indeterminate assemblages constituted by various forms of life and nonlife. Understanding shifting bodies across a given research context can help scholars be more conscious of the interconnected ecology of learners, technologies, natural environments, institutions, and other socially and materially recognizable bodies. This writing draws from a larger study that examined individual and collective literacy practices, which emerged as adolescent students took up various critical multimodal projects. The reflections featured here encapsulate my thinking through existing data, and this work is driven by the following questions:

During two summers, I conducted a research project with a community of youth world-builders and teachers in New York City. In this out-of-school summer program, various multimodal self-expressions intersected with critical thinking, narrative writing, and collaborative problem-solving. I examined how the seven students who opted to join the qualitative study engaged in multimodal activities and demonstrated increasing self-confidence as writers. Participants ranged in age between 13 and 18 years, and while the program was free and open to anyone who identified as a young woman or nonbinary youth, it primarily served Black, Latinx, AfroLatinx, and Asian American students from New York City. Many were interested in poetry, anime, fantasy novels, sketching, Korean pop music, hip-hop dance, and other forms of artistic expression that were not always sanctioned in school spaces.

Having become familiar with the program and its cofounders in 2016, I joined as a program assistant and primary researcher during the summer program in 2017 and 2018. I used ethnographic data collection methods such as field notes and open-ended interviews to examine how students engaged in various world-building activities and learned about the intersections between futurism and spatial justice. During the 5-week program, students learned to code, weave, model, and write. In the meantime, I took field note jottings, which were expanded into longer memos following each day, and I conducted open-ended interviews throughout the summers with four adult co-facilitators, seven student participants, and several guest teaching artists. I also examined program artifacts such as student work, lesson plans, and meeting memos.

The influence of outsiders can be destructive, as evidenced by enduring issues of settler colonialism and racist exploitation, but the disintegration of barriers between universities and local communities can also precipitate broader social movements (Cushman, 1996). From my own unfinished standpoint as a researcher, I was acutely aware of my relative status as a newcomer to Brooklyn. During graduate studies, I worked in my university’s undergraduate residential life services, which afforded crucial housing in an urban city with a high cost of living, but this privilege also limited my engagement with places outside of my neighborhood’s disproportionate affluence. My aim as a researcher was to remain sensitive to my incomplete and emerging knowledge about the context in which I was developing a partnership.

As I deepened my relationship with the youth program and its members, I used reflexive memos (Richardson, 2000) to better understand my positionality as a literacy researcher coming into community with learners and educators. I expanded on low-inference observations to articulate my evolving realizations as a participant observer, and my writings began to grapple with the ethics, ontologies, and epistemologies located within the research. Drawing from the praxis of thinking without method, I distilled my thoughts about the ethics of knowing and being as a researcher to facilitate an “opening to the unthought” (Jackson, 2017, p. 667). Unthought thoughts involve thinking differently with data to produce a “different encounter” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 118). In contrast to more stratified methodologies, thinking without method facilitates revelations through more fragmented processes of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and understanding (Deleuze, 1994, as cited in Jackson, 2017, p. 668). The next section elaborates on entanglements that became illuminated through a consideration of the unthought.

Human and Nonhuman Entanglements in Participant Observations

I have taken what Jackson (2017) has called the “outside of method” (p. 667) to be the activation of new thoughts through the resuscitation of field notes, photographs, and other data. Coming into the unthought requires pushing against predetermined methodological procedures to study representational limits and ongoing becomings rather than universal truths (Lather, 2007). Being “open to the world’s aliveness, allowing oneself to be lured by curiosity, surprise, and wonder” (Barad, 2012, p. 206), can spark new ideas during the earliest stages of a project or, as in the tradition of narrative inquiry, through reflections that take place in the years following notable incidents (Vinz, 1999). For this article, I decided to examine data collected in the summer of 2017 in the form of participant observations, interviews, and artifact analysis.

Following the first phase of research, I reviewed my notes and noticed increasingly salient entanglements among subjects and technological instruments. I collected these data in 2017, when I was invited to contribute to the Kindred Summer Program (all names are pseudonyms) as a documentarian, as I had been tasked with this role to help record students’ storytelling and playful encounters. This invitation from the adult co-facilitators was generous, as they had wanted to help me feel integrated into the learning community from the beginning. I appreciated the opportunity to capture moments and have a purposeful role that aligned with my aims as a researcher to observe and document, which I will later problematize.

In joining the writing program, I wanted to avoid being figured as an authoritative knowledge-holder, so stepping back and taking pictures from the periphery seemed to be the most useful way of contributing to the program at the time. At the co-facilitators’ request, I used the program’s DSLR camera to take images of participants across different spaces as they created online branching narratives, taught one another to crochet in a local park, and built 3D models of speculative worlds using architectural tools. I took hundreds of pictures over the course of the month, and some of these photos were later used in community newsletters that were emailed to participants, families, friends, and donors.

After the initial study, I reconvened with each of the primary co-facilitators to discuss the summer’s successes and potential changes for the coming year. In my interview with cofounder Terry, she reflected that she had been most excited to see how students seemed to benefit from meeting professional writers, engaging in creative activities, and participating in stimulating play. Toward the end of the interview, we discussed potential modifications for the following summer. She gently asked about my role as a documentarian and wondered if I had felt that I was able to be a part of the community in the way that I had wanted. This unthought thought invited an opening to “again imagine” and “produce knowledge differently” (Lather, 2013, p. 635). As I had been taking photographs and attempting to avoid being seen as an authority figure, I realized I had spent less time participating in movement breaks and engaging with multimodal play alongside youth. Although no one had expressed vocal or visible discomfort in my limited recollection, I felt compelled to reassess my role.

As Zapata et al. (2018) have explained, researchers can “come to know through our entanglement with other bodies (human, nonhuman, more-than-human) in the world” (p. 484). As I reflected on Terry’s important question, I was placed into a critical encounter with my own entanglements and a reexamination of the ethics, knowing, and being involved in my role as a documentarian. This moment presented a threshold, which Jackson (2017) has defined as “a middle, a phase, a passing” (p. 672). I pictured Foucauldian methods of surveillance and envisioned various technologies that have reinforced systems of dominance and exploitation of marginalized communities, particularly under the veil of scientific advancement. I thought about how technologies such as cameras have too often served as monitoring devices to track the bodies and minds of Black and Latinx students, who are routinely surveilled through disciplinary mechanisms in schools and other regulated spaces.

While my camera was not serving the same kind of harsh, punitive function as the above examples, I came to understand that it was not simply a mediating apparatus that served a programmatic purpose—It had become a productive machine with which I was deeply entangled. I had remained more ancillary to primary activities so that I could ensure regular documentation, but this positioning had framed me foremost as a photographer interested in conclusive representations rather than as a co-learner. In embracing the role of a documentarian, I had prioritized recording moments for later audiences rather than experiencing them in the moment as a participant myself. While these thoughts did not cohere all at once, they were catalyzed by the instructor’s question and continued to be refined through drafts of this writing and continuing unfolding encounters with the unthought.

During the conversation, I recalled that at one point in the summer, some of the students had used the camera to pose and take pictures on the porch on their own. When I responded to Terry, I wondered aloud whether the task of taking pictures the following summer could be shared with the student participants, who could use their own phones to have greater agency to decide which photos to take, delete, and share publicly with others. Terry agreed and thought to invite the next year’s student fellows, who were returning youth participants and program mentors, to use a designated smartphone to take photos and post selected ones on the program’s official Instagram page.

In the following year, student fellows took on most of the photographic responsibilities, and given the new title of a general “program assistant,” I found that I could be more readily available to participants and teachers. Along with other part-time program assistants and nonteaching interns, I helped to answer questions about project steps and offered more hands-on support in the form of cleaning, gluing, and obtaining supplies. I also joined participants in dance warm-ups led by fellows and painted alongside the learners during multimodal activities. If I was not already involved in a conversation or lesson, I took a couple of pictures of workshops when I saw focused engagement and collaborative activities, which could be illustrative for a larger community to view in the program’s community newsletters.

I continued to take field notes in between workshop sessions or during mini-lectures, but my participation became more apparent. Because I split photographic responsibilities with other program assistants and student fellows, my pictures amounted to a handful rather than hundreds, and the program co-facilitators and I still had plenty to review after the program day for program materials and research purposes, respectively. As I became more involved in literacy activities like journaling exercises and coded weaving, I learned about students’ preferences for various Korean dramas and Billie Eilish songs. When I shifted from the role of photographer to that of co-learner, my entanglements with participants revealed new insights into multiple literacy practices.

Literacy Research and Ongoing Becomings

To inspire the differently produced knowledge that Lather (2013) has rightly advocated for in her work, the classical humanist subject is no longer a viable starting point for literacy researchers. There is perhaps a comfort to the predictable efficiency of randomized controlled trials and even to the compelling narratives ascribed to conventional qualitative research methods, but by revisiting the shifting entanglements of subjects and technological attachments across learning assemblages, it is possible to become even more conscious of the elements that shape the ever-changing contours of a research site. Citing Barad (2007) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Beucher et al. (2019) have claimed that “agency is shared between humans and nonhuman matter and emergent in each passing moment” (p. 449).

As each research method has its own set of limitations and tensions (see Caraballo et al., 2017), participant observations are not without their unique complications. However, such methods can be used in conjunction with a close examination of human and nonhuman entanglements to renegotiate literacy research practices. Rather than remaining fixed and sedimented, literacy research must be situated within “a much larger historical, political and cultural context” (Smith, 2013, p. 6) that accounts for dynamic connections among visible and invisible matter. Notably, an ethico-onto-epistemological account of research also necessitates further thinking with Indigenous frameworks of interconnectedness and decolonial interrogations of capitalism, colonialism, and militarism (Barad, 2017; Paris & Winn, 2013; Patel, 2015; Smith, 2013; Tuck, 2010). While representations in the form of written publications appear to be deceptively static, in articulating the importance of developing an ethico-onto-epistemological lens, I trust that literacy researchers will continue to complicate and produce new methods that speak to our “shifting roles . . . as listener, learner, advocate, and participant” (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014, p. 22).

Being an “outside observer [who] . . . stands back and notes the resulting marks on bodies” has long been outdated in social science research (Barad, 2007, p. 153), but questions about the ethics of research are not readily solved by refusing to use recording instruments. The pen, cognitive faculties, and other documentation tools remain integral to the process of data collection, yet remaining open to the unthought can expose different ways of understanding material, discursive, and affective dynamics across research sites. In contrast to providing representationalist accounts, ethico-onto-epistemological reworkings can contest seemingly closed portraits of participants and spaces, and it is through a reassessment of participant–observer roles that scholars can become even more attentive to “the world’s aliveness.”

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