Nexus analysis provides new lenses for seeing relations among people, things, and places differently. This fits into a recent turn toward sociomaterialism in literacy studies, which is rapidly proliferating new avenues for critical engagement (Wohlwend & Lewis, 2010). For example, new materialist interpretive frameworks on play and making (Boldt & Leander, 2017, Thiel & Jones, 2017; Wargo, 2017; Ehret, Hollett, & Jocius, 2016) explore its potential for critical readings and productive reassemblage of problematic texts (Buchholz, 2018; Yoon, 2018; Wessel Powell, 2018; Scott & Wohlwend, 2017). Recent work by our Literacy Playshop research team (Scott & Wohlwend, 2017; Davis et al., 2021) explores ways of disrupting stuck places in children's media toys through "toyhacking" or changing the physical appearance of a toy to enable more storylines that expand play).
• In your site, consider those places in research that have been filtered out, the scraps that have been swept away or tidied up.
• What could you see in these discarded data if you looked from a different coactant’s perspective? How does shifting perspective on a mediated action (e.g., cutting out to cutting with) reveal your assumptions as a researcher?
• How could your power relations be flattened in this place? How might a shift in control of the time and the space change the dynamic:
• Between researcher and participants?
• Between teachers and students?
• Between people and things?
• What shift might make things more messy, loosening the grip of the stabilizing structure in a stuck place?
• What small change can participants make that could get things moving again?
• What kinds of messing around with literacies can you imagine that might remake nexus in your site and create more engaging and equitable places for contemporary childhoods?